OUTSIDE IN: SELECTED PROSE / INSIDE OUT: SELECTED POETRY AND TRANSLATIONS
Alastair Reid
Both volumes Polygon, £14.99I'VE enjoyed many memorable moments at the Edinburgh Book Festival, but one in particular sticks in mind. One d
ay my attention was drawn to a lean, hawk-nosed figure, talking animatedly. A wasp flew into his mouth mid-sentence. Not missing a beat, he spat it out, crushed it underfoot and carried on as if nothing in particular had happened. I was impressed, and not just by the display of sang froid. There was an unhurried but focused quality about him. "Who is that?" I asked. "Oh," came the reply. "That's Alastair Reid."
As it happens, earlier that year I had been asked to prepare a reprint of his celebrated essay Digging Up Scotland for his Book Festival appearance. I wanted to know why. "He's out of print," explained the festival's director Catherine Lockerbie in dismay.
We shouldn't have been surprised. Reid had lived most of his life outside Scotland, and had, on occasion, been highly critical of his native country and its propensity to Calvinist gloom. Neglect of him was symptomatic of parochial navel gazing. Even today, if one looks up various anthologies and critical studies of Scottish writing, he is represented by a handful of poems and a few lines of appreciation at most.
Yet in the wider world, Reid is highly regarded for his poetry and prose, and many of the central figures of 20th century literature recognised him as a brilliant translator and interpreter of their work. Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Álvaro Mutis – the list goes on and on. Neruda once urged him, only half in jest, to improve his poems by translation, while Márquez, on reading Basilisks' Eggs, an astonishing analysis of his work, sent him a telegram which read: "If that is not how I came to write One Hundred Years Of Solitude, it is now." Through a rare act of imaginative sympathy, Reid had not only immersed himself in the language and cultures of the Hispanic world, he had understood its soul.
Earlier, Reid had been an intimate of Robert Graves, and had served an apprenticeship in Majorca under that powerful mind, an extraordinary experience he later captured in a brilliant short memoir. Moving to New York in the 1950s, he began to publish poems in The New Yorker, and under its legendary editor, William Shawn, turned his hand to prose. Over the next five decades, Reid contributed more than 100 pieces, crafting a body of work that Andrew O'Hagan, in his introduction to a new selection of Reid's essays, has rightly called among the best prose to come out of Scotland in the past century.
His association with the magazine was heaven sent, for it gave him the space to follow his wide interests, to own his own time and to write wonderfully about it all. Reid settled for long periods in France, Switzerland, Spain and elsewhere in the Hispanic world, always a foreigner but never a tourist. His love affair with Spain produced a series of brilliant portraits of life under Franco from an urban and rural point of view; a decade in the Dominican Republic resulted in the masterpiece of cultural politics that is Waiting For Columbus, included here; while short stays in Gibraltar and the Basque country spawned some wonderful meditations on the oddities of identity. He was also capable of a lighter though no less penetrating touch, as his coverage of five successive football World Cups shows.
Behind it all lay Scotland, a country he often visited and wrote about with the wry, frustrated fascination that is an aspect of fierce, though by no means uncritical, love. A son of the manse, Reid grew up in Whithorn and Selkirk, an experience which, though rich and rewarding, he was anxious to leave behind. Like many poets he has often returned to the territory of childhood, in a radiant series of essays which demonstrate where his wonder at, and openness to, the world came from.
As Douglas Dunn notes in his introduction to a companion volume of poems and translations, Reid's "amazement" is the thing. Harnessed by a mastery of craft, informed by bilingualism and the influence of Borges, it has given us a body of work which should be celebrated as uniquely Scottish, and effortlessly cosmopolitan.
