Published on November 17, 2005

Every educated Thai born after World War II knows the name So Sethaputra. The English-Thai/Thai-English dictionaries he compiled have, since the late 1940s, been fixtures in many a home, despite the fact that many such lexicons have been published since.

Of course, there was George Bradley McFarland’s Thai-English Dictionary in 1940. It’s often considered the first Thai-English dictionary meant to serve English-speaking students.

Now, consider this: How does one tell the life story of a dictionary compiler?

Biographer Pimpawan, So’s wife, seems to have asked herself this question before she embarked on his biography. To her, the compilation of the dictionary wasn’t the most important fact about So’s life. She just considers it an inevitable product of the talents and principles this “man with the spirit of a fighter” had.

All his life, from youth to most of his adulthood, So fought against the odds – financial, political and economical – to carry out the monumental work he had set his mind to.

Users of his “New Model English-Thai Dictionary” could gather from the preface that he was compiling the dictionary while serving a jail term as a political prisoner and that he had other political prisoners as assistants.

But everything stops there. We have no idea why he became a political prisoner or how he struggled to complete this time-consuming work in prison. Worse, as the biography tells us, the compiler endured conditions that could have cut short his mission. Twice political prisoners, including So, were heavily shackled and transferred from island to island in flimsy fishing boats. The consequences would have been fatal if the boats had capsized.

Pimpawan deftly portrays So, a man 23 years her senior whom she married in 1951, as a much larger figure. She tells us that So’s knowledge of English and Thai wasn’t just bookish but had firm roots in his use of the languages.

He wrote for Thai newspapers since the age of 15 so that he could help his widowed mum, and taught Thai to British expatriates to pay for his secondary education.

He won a royal scholarship and completed his bachelor’s degree with honours in mineralogy and mining in Manchester, England.

During the four years he spent studying there, So wrote for both Thai and English publications in Thailand to continue supporting his mum.

He had bright career prospects when he returned in 1926, and soon became part of King Rama VII’s secretarial bureau until absolute monarchy ended in 1932.

Unfortunately, his fall from grace came when he was imprisoned over the 1933 Bowordej uprising, which was meant to restore constitutional monarchy.

According to Pimpawan, So produced political communiqu?s for the rebels in response to a last-minute call for help from a friend. However, she doesn’t deny that So was taking sides, at least ideologically, with the rebels.

Then came the 11-odd years in jail that So spent compiling his dictionary.

Here, the biographer does a good job of getting into the mind of the subject – understanding the man’s thoughts, feeling his passions and reliving his experiences with intensity and empathy.

The making of the dictionary in prison is excellently documented.

It began in a Bangkok prison, moved to Koh Tarutao, the island of convicts, and finally to the deserted Koh Tao at the beginning of the Pacific War. Papers and all the necessary equipment was smuggled in and hidden in a hole in the cell’s ceiling.

Then there was the risky operation of smuggling the manuscript out to a publisher, who pretended it had been submitted before So was imprisoned.

As one might guess, the lack of food, medicine, clothes and just about everything else on the two islands made it difficult for prisoners to stay alive, let alone undertake the compilation of a dictionary. Yet So was determined to complete the dictionary, partly because not finishing it would be tantamount to fraud, since many people had already made advance payments to the publisher.

After his release, So was elected a member of parliament for the Thon Buri constituency and served as a vice-minister of agriculture. The merging of his Progress Party with the Democracy Party in 1946 gave birth to the Democrat Party of today.

However, he soon decided to leave the world of politics and briefly became the publisher, editor, writer and proofreader for the English newspaper Liberty and, subsequently the bilingual weekly Leader.

He also wrote books on studying abroad and learning English.

In the latter part of his life, he concentrated solely on printing his dictionaries.

Pimpawan’s account in the biography is vivid and very polished.

She was educated in Penang and was working as a reporter for the Bangkok Post when she met So, married him and had nine children with him.

Though she sometimes doesn’t seem all that forthcoming about So’s political leanings, she does do her best to express the respect and admiration she felt for him – less as a famous dictionary compiler than as a man of principles.

So’s letters from England to another sweetheart before he met Pimpawan are also included in the book to present an accurate and authentic picture.

Well-chosen photographs add to the biography’s appeal.

Pimpawan died of a lung infection in 2000.

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