Alastair Reid
Photo © Susan Wood
Alastair Reid was a poet, a prose chronicler, a translator, and a traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in the New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he became a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. In his lifetime, he published more than forty books, among them a classic wordbook for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn. In 2008, he published in the U.K. two career-spanning volumes, Outside In: Selected Prose and Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations. His Barefoot: The Collected Poems was published posthumously in 2018. The substance of Supposing... he gleaned from the many children who have influenced him, to all of whom he owes and dedicates the text.