Alastair Reid, 1926–2014
We’re saddened by the death this week of Alastair Reid, a poet, translator, traveler, and children’s book author. 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. He translated Borges and Neruda and published more than forty books, among them a wordbook for children, Ounce Dice Trice (with drawings by Ben Shahn) and a splendidly weird book of speculations, Supposing (illustrated by Bob Gill), both published by The New York Review Children’s Collection. Reid died on Sunday, September 21, at age eighty-eight.