ArtsBeat

On the eve of last month's announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that awards the prize made front page news in most American media outlets by discounting the possibility that any American writer would receive the honor in the near term.  American writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” he averred.  “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

America's ignorance of other cultures and languages--which some would suggest a corollary of the doctrine of "American exceptionalism"-- has emerged as major theme in international relations over the past decade, but in the literary world its most immediate manifestation is the systematic undervaluation of literature in translation by mainstream publishers, in academia, and by the reading public.

That's all the more reason to welcome Alastair Reid back to Buffalo.  The Scottish-born poet, essayist, literary scholar and translator who will deliver this year's Silverman Memorial Poetry Reading tonight (Friday) at 8 p.m. in 250 Baird Hall on the University of Buffalo's North Campus is one of principal English language translators of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Argentinean fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges--the two South American writers whose acceptance in to the canon of world literature in the 1960's and early 70's paved the way for the subsequent "Latin American Boom" literature of Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  He is also an important translator of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, the Venezuelan Eugenio Montejo, and the Mexican poet José Emilio Pachedo.

A longtime correspondent to and contributing South American editor of The New Yorker magazine during the William Shawn era, Reid's six decade long career as what Neruda called a "Patapelá" ("barefoot") or itinerant scholar took him from Spain to Switzerland, from Greece to Morocco, throughout Latin America, the United States and the U.K., always in pursuit of the company of poets and of the life of letters.  He enjoyed a brief flirtation with American popular culture as director of the controversial adaptation of Armistead Maupin's first Tales of the City for PBS (and Channel Four in the UK) in 1993, one of his many credits as a film director.

Although not nearly as well known for his own poetry as for his translations and his prose, Reid has lived long enough to witness a revival of interest in his work.  Selections from his poetry collections Whereabouts (1987), Weathering (1978), and To Lighten My House (1953), were anthologized in The Alastair Reid Reader (University Press of New England,1994).   A collection of prose and poetry, Oases (Canongate, 1997), includes an extended essay on Neruda and Borges, including Neruda's famous advice to him upon learning of a grammatical liberty he had taken in translation of the Chilean poet's lyrics.

“Alastair, don’t just translate my poems. I want you to improve them,” Neruda told him.  In 2004, Reid took his best shot at that tall order with his On the Blue Shore of Silence (HarperCollins), a new selection of his translations of Neruda’s poems of the sea.

--R.D. Pohl