An Alastair Reid Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose

This new volume in the Bread Loaf Series of Contemporary Writers collects the essays, criticism, musings, poetry and translations of Scottish-born Reid, a longtime New Yorker contributor whose ``wandering life'' has taken him to Spain, London, Latin America, many corners of the U.S. and beyond. Reid's intelligence seems most engaged by the role and metaphor of translation, not only in the sense of rendering one language into another but of serving as a translator between distinct realms of experience, or between experience and the impulse to capture it in words. He is a mediator whose authority is necessarily improvisational, subject to change and addressing it as a theme. This may be why his pieces that relate directly to travel, uprooting and literary translation-an art of change-are the most interesting here. Especially in ``Basilisks' Eggs,'' where he discusses the challenges of literary translation, and in ``Digging Up Scotland,'' an excavation of his personal and national origins, Reid writes trenchantly about the vagaries of living and working in ``a number of different countries, a number of different languages.'' (Jan.)