Alastair Reid was a Scottish writer whose imagination dwelt in the Hispanic world. He was at least as well known for his translations of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and other Spanish-speaking writers as for his own poetry. Reid was also a superb writer of prose, the larger part of which appeared in the New Yorker where he was a staff writer for 40 years during the magazine’s heyday. Memoirs of his stormy friendship with the writer Robert Graves, chronicles of his life in a village in Spain, and latterly excursions into contemporary Scottish life, among other essays, appeared first in the New Yorker before being collected in books, including Passwords (1964) and Whereabouts (1987).