C. Luke Soucy is a translator, poet, and classicist specializing in Roman literature. He is a 2019 graduate of Princeton University, where he majored in English, muddled through Latin, and received the E. E. Cummings Society Prize of the Academy of American Poets. His blank verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, out this fall, is the first to use the same number of lines as the original. He is the first nonwhite, first Gen Z, and first queer person to translate the poem.
While working on a new verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I discovered that skepticism toward my project tended to follow a specific trajectory. People who began with perhaps too much faith in…
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