His first book project, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A New Translation was published in November 2023 by UC Press. The translation was recently shortlisted for the 2024 National Translation Award in Poetry, recognizing “literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality.” The award citation praised Soucy’s work for capturing the original text’s “poetry, wit, subversive nature, and extravagant literary devices.” 

As an English major, Soucy discovered a love of ancient literature within the classrooms in Scheide Caldwell, East Pyne, and McCosh. It was ultimately his Latin coursework that inspired his first book. In this Q&A, he discusses his motivations and methodologies, and the Princeton path that led him to this work.

To start, tell me a little bit about Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the keystones of not only Roman literature, but European literature, and even modern literature, as defined in various ways. Although it’s a Latin text rather than a Greek one, when people talk about Greek or classical mythology, they are usually talking about stories from this book: in the Western tradition, its influence is really only comparable to Shakespeare and the Bible. At the same time, it’s fascinatingly irreverent. If you look at the versions of myths predating Ovid, you can tell he was changing all sorts of things. And in this current moment where we’re very interested in classical myth, but also in retelling those myths, it’s amazing that this one text stands as the origin point both for the stories themselves and that drive to adapt them.

Why were you interested in translating this particular text? 

I was an undergraduate [English major] at Princeton, and I took a lot of courses in the classics department. In fact, I learned all my Latin here. Latin 101 was my first class, on the first day of term, at 9 a.m., my first year at Princeton. I had always been interested in antiquity, but I grew up going to public school in the Midwest. It was a great school, but they were not teaching ancient languages. 

I was first exposed to Ovid's Metamorphoses when I took a 300-level Latin course with Johannes Haubold my senior year. I thought it was both an important text, and an entertaining one. At the end of my senior year, truly the day after graduation, I was thinking to myself, "I need to practice in order to keep my Latin up or I'm going to lose it." 

And I figured, I really liked that poem and found it not a tremendous hardship to work on, and so maybe I'd just translate a few lines a day. But I'm one of those people who just bites off astronomically more than I can chew, and then forces myself to live with it. Pretty soon, I was writing down the things I was translating, and pretty soon I had done the entire thing.

Was this your first translation project?

Yes. I had never meaningfully translated – certainly not seriously – translated anything before. This is my first book, and I was devising my methodology as I was going through.

Tell me a bit about that methodology.  

I was translating 35 lines a day for almost the entire time I was doing it. Maybe one day I’d go a little over to complete a sentence, but I tried to stay consistent as a practice. Ovid's Metamorphoses is about 12,000 lines long, just short, 11,995, and you can plow through that at 35 lines a day in a little over a year. 

What makes this translation special? 

One of the things that makes it special in a very concrete, formal way, is that it’s the first translation [of this text] to be line for line and in blank verse, or iambic pentameter. Because of the difficulties in translating between forms, previous blank verse translations of the work, of which there are a few, are all much longer – sometimes thousands of lines longer. 

But there were 12,000 lines in the original, and that's the number of lines in mine. And what that does, I hope, is preserve the original poetic drive. 

How did your experience at Princeton shape this process? 

You’ll see if you go through the acknowledgements in the book that I was extremely well supported as I was editing and trying to get it published. Jeff Dolven wrote one of the blurbs. Tamsen Wolff was very helpful to me in putting together the proposal, and she was a wonderful adviser to me when I was in the English department. And [people like] Bob Kaster and Andrew Feldherr in the classics department answered some of my impertinent questions about what's going on in the Latin in the text. The entire translation community at Princeton, in the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, led by Karen Emmerich, has been extremely welcoming to me. 

I think the aggregate here is that, between these various programs, I have been so supported and felt so welcome to be pursuing this kind of work from my home in Princeton. I learned to do it all here, and I'm continuing to do it here.

Why should people read this translation? 

One reason is political, and this is why a lot of people are doing re-translations right now, particularly with this text, which famously contains scenes of sexual assault, and put more broadly, scenes of oppression, scenes of power dynamics. It's not just that I come with different sensibilities compared to a translator in the 1950s, it’s that we also have different attitudes towards the author. 

Ovid is someone who, for a long time, was considered this teasing, unserious poet who made a lot of silly choices and had to be sort of translated against. He’s certainly not a feminist in the modern sense of the term, but he really has a problem with authority and is often interested in giving a voice to victims and the oppressed. That's the sort of thing that translators historically have really been working against consciously or not. So, between the political and the poetic considerations, as well as in sticking to the length, I genuinely claim to have done something new.

I also really like puns. Ovid does a lot of puns, and I think I’m good at translating them. 

What’s next for you? 

I am in the finishing stages of my next book, which is the going to be the first-ever anthology of queer Roman verse — due out from Norton Liveright in 2026. These poems are, thankfully, much shorter than the one very, very long poem.