Colloquy: Emily Wilson & Luke Soucy on Translating the Epic

Please join World Poetry Books and the Brooklyn Public Library’s BPL Presents for the latest installment of Colloquy: Translators in Conversation, featuring translating the epic, with readings and discussion from Emily Wilson and Luke Soucy. Wilson will read from her translations of the Homeric epics and Soucy will read from his translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis. followed by a conversation. This event will be moderated by Colloquy curator C. Francis Fisher.

We will explore the way in which translators make ancient times legible for contemporary artists, how formal choices such as writing in iambic pentameter constrain or clarify the meaning of the original, and the political dimensions of retranslating canonical works.

Since the fall of 2022, World Poetry's Colloquy event series has provided a forum for translators working in various genres to engage with live audiences through readings and conversations.  Colloquy events are broadcast and archived by our collaborators at Montez Press Radio for broader access. Transcripts of the live discussions have been published in Hopscotch and Asymptote.

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PARTICIPANTS

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2025, she received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree from University of King’s College in Halifax. She lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.

 

 

 

Luke Soucy is a translator, classicist, and vocal Minnesota native. Queer, biracial, and variously formal, he began writing in ninth grade in the foolhardy belief he could impress a boy with enough acrostic sonnets. More recent efforts ranging from light verse to classical scholarship have appeared in Arion, Light, and on poets.org. Soucy’s translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (University of California Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry and his Anthology of Queer Roman Verse is forthcoming from Liveright in 2026. Soucy is an increasingly less recent graduate of Princeton University, where he currently works.