The poet and translator Alastair Reid, who died on Monday at the age of eighty-eight, had itchy feet. He was famously itinerant and lived all over the world—New York, England, Spain, Switzerland, Mexico, Chile, Argentina—but seldom for more than a year or so in a single place. In the mid-sixties, he was based on a houseboat moored off Cheyne Walk, in London, ready, as he once said, to cast off at a moment’s notice. For years the closest thing he had to a permanent address was his office at this magazine, where his mail used to pile up in wire baskets until Alastair suddenly swooped in for a few months, like some tall, sandy-haired bird of passage, before just as suddenly departing. You knew he was in residence, even if you hadn’t seen him, by the sound of his exuberant laugh and sometimes by the tendrils of dope smoke seeping from beneath his closed door.
Alastair was a Scot. He grew up in a rectory in Whithorn, in the southwestern part of Scotland known as Galloway, where his father was the minister. All his life he spoke with a pleasing Scottish burr, but as quickly as he could he got out from under the dour ancestral cloud. He made fun of it, in fact, in a poem now beloved by his countrymen, in which he writes of meeting a shopkeeper on a rare cloudless day and exclaiming about the weather. This is how the shopkeeper reacts:
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
As she spoke with their ancient misery:
"We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!"
Alastair was cheerful, funny, and irreverent, with high expressive eyebrows that were frequently squeezed together in amusement. And he was cosmopolitan, at a time when many of us at The New Yorker were more than a little provincial, convinced that the magazine’s then shabby offices, at 25 West Forty-third Street, were actually the center of the universe.
During the war, Alastair served with the Royal Navy, where he learned the knack of travelling light, and then in the early fifties—apparently for no other reason except that it was the opposite of Scotland—he moved to Spain, where he found a second home in the Spanish language. He quickly proved so fluent that he became the trusted friend and translator of most of the great Latin-American writers of the time. Borges, Neruda, Donoso, García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa—he was on a first-name basis with them all, and in a quiet, unassuming way had a great deal to do with helping establish their reputations in the English-speaking world.
In the offices of The New Yorker then, Alastair seemed like a world citizen, a Marco Polo of literature, returned with news of riches we had never imagined. Eventually, some of us even found out that, as a young man, he had apprenticed himself to Robert Graves, and run away with Graves’s girlfriend! To his admiring younger colleagues he was a living connection to a vast, glittering literary web. If you shook hands with Alastair, we imagined, you touched the hand that had steered Borges by the elbow, that had slapped the back of Gabo, tossed back shots with Neruda, and, if you included Graves, that had shook the hand that shook the hand of Thomas Hardy. No one else at The New Yorker then had those kinds of connections, and, at the same time, no one took himself less seriously. He was as apt to hang out with the messengers as with the poetry editor.
In the mid-eighties, Alastair got himself and the magazine in a lot of hot water by cheerfully revealing that in a reporting piece he had done from Spain he had resorted to the old feature writer’s device of cobbling together a composite character. It seemingly never occurred to him that this kind of thing was no longer acceptable, if it ever had been. The storm eventually blew over, but his relationship to The New Yorker was never quite the same. The absences grew longer, the visits to the office more fleeting, the publications less frequent. What did he live on? some of us used to wonder. Very little, it turned out. Like his mentor Graves, he had learned to pare his life down to essentials. Neruda nicknamed him Patapelá—Mr. Barefoot.
Alastair spent much of the eighties and nineties living with his companion (and later wife), Leslie Clark, on a ginger plantation in a remote part of the Dominican Republic. He worked the land during the day—he had big, farmer’s mitts, not poet’s hands—and in the evening swung in his hammock and listened on the radio to ballgames from el norte. Sometime around 2003, when tourism invaded his part of the Dominican, he surprised himself (and many who knew him) by spending more and more time in Whithorn, the place he once couldn’t get away from fast enough. He gratefully rented a cottage on a farm just miles from the church where his father used to preach.
Alastair lived long enough that, by the time he died, there weren’t many people left at The New Yorker who remembered his name, let alone how vivid his presence had been. No one understood better than he that literary fame is often short-lived. But his translations are still in use, and are models of their kind, his renderings of Borges and Neruda especially. They stand on their own as works in English, with none of that awkward translatorese that seeks to remind you that what you’re reading is not the original. And yet they preserve much of what makes those authors distinct—Borges’s fussy, deliberately old-fashioned quality, for example, and Neruda’s unfettered passion.
Alastair was also an accomplished and highly regarded poet in his own right. In the late seventies, he gave poetry up, saying that it now seemed to him an affectation, like wearing a necktie. (By then he had long given up suits and ties himself, and usually wore lightweight traveller’s garb, the kind of artificial-fiber clothes you can rinse out overnight in a hotel sink.) But it’s not impossible that, of all his accomplishments, the poems may linger longest. They’re still immensely readable, formal yet colloquial—neckties with the knot slightly loosened, the top shirt button undone. They inhabit the same poetic territory as some of Auden, Merrill, Larkin—where the seemingly casual edges over into something profound. Here is part of a poem called "Curiosity":
Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die—
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious
have if they live a tale
worth telling at all.
