Translator — Poet — Classicist
SHORTLIST
NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD
"Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fundamental document of Western literature... However, most translations of it into English do not capture its poetry, wit, subversive nature, and extravagant literary devices. C. Luke Soucy’s translation deftly conveys all of these."
ABOUT ME
C. LUKE SOUCY is a translator, poet, and vocal Minnesota native. Born gay and biracial, he began writing in ninth grade out of the foolhardy belief he could impress a boy with a string of acrostic sonnets. More recent efforts ranging from light verse to classical scholarship have appeared in Arion, Light, and on poets.org, and his new verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, released by the University of California Press in November, has been shortlisted for the National Translation Award for Poetry. He is currently at work on an anthology of queer Roman verse and the first line-for-line translation of the Punica.
Soucy is a 2019 graduate of Princeton University, where he concentrated in English and received the E. E. Cummings Prize of the Academy of American Poets. He counts among his many frivolous passions breakfast food, woollen scarves, and murder mysteries set on board trains. In addition to literary translation, Soucy has worked in the regional theater, in a chromatography lab, and as a low-ranking university bureaucrat. He now resides in Princeton, New Jersey, where he can usually be found squinting into the distance or walking back from the grocery store.
AWARDS
ovid's metamorphoses
CITATION
There is no doubt that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fundamental document of Western literature, virtually the source book for Graeco-Roman mythology. However, most translations of it into English do not capture its poetry, wit, subversive nature, and extravagant literary devices. C. Luke Soucy’s translation deftly conveys all of these. The gods are presented in all their power and cruelty. In particular, a rape is a rape. Soucy’s strict, line-for-line iambic pentameter rushes the rambling poem forward, while his use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and rhetorical tropes match Ovid’s poetic inventiveness and make the reader eager to continue reading.
Horace, ode 4.1
[12/13/2017]
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Gnomes of Rome
Ovid's Golden Age
Punica, Book 1
PRESS AND PRAISE
An astonishing translation—Soucy’s sophisticated rhythms carry the force, violence, and beauty of Ovid’s immortal poem. Reading it, reading it out loud, I felt so palpably the vitality thrumming beneath the refinement of form.
RICHIE HOFMANN
author of A Hundred Lovers
OTHER ACTIVITIES
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