Talent Is Where You Find It

I recently finished reading Helen Rowe Henze’s translation of The Odes of Horace (University of Oklahoma Press, 1961). I found this inside the book jacket:

Helen Rowe Henze is the author of four published collections of poems and of many individual poems published in periodicals and newspapers. A resident of Kansas City and in secretarial employment there, she confirms the truth of the adage, “Talent is where you find it”–in Venusia or Missouri.

You job and your vocation are not always the same. You don’t always earn regular pay from your life’s most important work. People are deep wells.

There are many translations of the Odes. But I’m glad my public library led me to this one.