Alastair Reid

From Philosopedia

Reid, Alastair (1926– )

Although born in Whithorn, Scotland, Reid chose to live mainly in Hispanic countries. The son of a minister, he is a poet, translator, essayist, and author of books for children.

Ounce, Dice, Trice (1958) is a collection of puns and odd-sounding “nonsense” words. Weathering (1978) is a collection of his poems. Reid translated Neruda’s Isla Negra Notebook (1982) and Borges’s Gold of the Tigers (1977). In 1997, his Oases: Poems and Prose was published and included

I am old enough now for a tree

once planted, knee high, to have grown to be

twenty times me,

and to have seen babies marry, and heroes grow deaf -

but that's enough meaning-of-life

It's living through time we ought to be connoisseurs of.

In “Remembering Robert Graves,” Reid tells of his long friendship with Graves, “a first-rate classicist” who, in the course of writing the two Claudius novels, “had immersed himself in Roman history” and who taught him much about writing. Graves, he wrote, “was a deicide [one who kills or destroys a god]; he had made from the great tangle of his existence a religion that he could feel true to, and which could resolve the contradictions and oppositions in his thinking. As a devotee, he was privy to the Goddess’s will. He always bowed solemnly nine times at the first sight of the new moon. To the supplanting of the Goddess by a Father God he attributed all the ills of the modern world.” Since the Bronze Age, Reid explained, an all-embracing female deity - Moon Goddess, an Earth Mother, controlling seasons, fertility, and the cycle of birth and death - had been worshipped throughout Europe until challenged by the male gods of the Greco-Roman world. With Christianity, goddess worship disappeared, preserved, according to Graves, by poets alone as a divine secret - or through the worship of a muse. From his vast reading, Graves created a monomyth that gave order to his deepest convictions and restored to poetry some of the sanctity he felt it had lost by neglecting myth for reason.” Commented Reid, “I never believed in the Goddess, any more than I believed in a Christian God. I realized, however, that Robert did believe, insistently so, and that the belief sustained and justified him.”

{The New Yorker, 4 September 1995}