Alastair Reid



Alastair Reid (born 22 March 1926) is a Scottish poet and academic.

Life
Reid was born in Wigtown, Galloway, Scotland.

He has lived in Spain, Switzerland, and France, throughout Latin America, and in the United States, where he was employed by The New Yorker magazine.

A scholar of South American literature, he is known for his lighthearted style of poems and for his translations of South American poets Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. Although he is famous for translations, his own poems are gaining note.

In 1984, in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, Reid admitted fabricating many details of his reporting from Spain for the New Yorker, including inventing places and ascribing statements to composite characters. He said these inventions were an attempt to present "a larger truth, of which facts form a part." In his book, Whereabouts, Reid counters this article with the following:
 * These pieces were at the center of a curious storm that blew up in the American press during June of 1984. A year or so before, I had addressed a seminar at Yale University on the wavering line between fact and fiction, using examples from various writers, Borges among them, and from my own work. A student from the seminar went on to become a reporter and published a piece in the Wall Street Journal that charged me with having made a practice of distorting facts, quoting the cases I had cited in the seminar. Many newspaper editorials took up the story as though it were fact, and used it to wag pious fingers at the New Yorker. A number of columnists reproved me for writing about an "imaginary" Spanish village, a charge that would have delighted the flesh-and-blood inhabitants.... Not a single one of my critics, as far as I could judge, had gone back to read the pieces in question.

He has published more than 40 books, including Ounce Dice Trice, a book of word-play for children (illustrated by Ben Shahn), and two selections from his works: Outside In: Selected Prose and Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations (both 2008).

Poetry

 * Oddments, Inklings, Omens, Moments: Poems. London: J.M. Dent, 1960.
 * Passwords: Places, poems, preoccupations. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964.
 * Weathering: Poems and translations. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1978.
 * Inside Out: Selected poetry and translations (introduction by Douglas Dunn). Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008.

Non-fiction

 * Whereabouts: Notes on being a foreigner. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1987.
 * Oases: Poems and prose. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997.
 * Outside In: Selected prose (introduction by Andrew O’Hagan). Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008.

Translated

 * Pablo Neruda, We Are Many. London: Cape Goliard, 1968.
 * Pablo Neruda, Extravagaria. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
 * Pablo Neruda, Fully Empowered. London: Souvenir Press, 1976.
 * Jose Emilio Pacheco, Don't Ask Me How the Time Goes By: poems 1964-1968. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
 * Pablo Neruda, Isla Negra: a notebook. London: Souvenir Press, 1982.
 * Herberto Padilla, Antipodes. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2004.

''Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Scottish Poetry Library.