My own private Sydney High — 2

More octogenarian musings and memories

Sydney Boys High Quad 2012 — Apollo Belvedere

Yes we studied Latin — most of us in the first three years — just one class out of five did not — and a select few continued through to the 4th and 5th years. We were blessed with the amazing Edgar Bembrick, author of cribs and textbooks, about whom I have written before, most recently in a review of Call Me By Your Name!

So the movie opens with a montage of Greco-Roman statues of beautiful youths, including (if I recall correctly) Hadrian’s favourite Antinous. In the movie Elio, Elio’s father and the visiting US post-doctoral student Oliver visit Sirmio. Instantly an oldie like me — or more particularly as one who did Latin for the Leaving in 1959 when Catullus was a set text — pricked up my ears. Way back in 1959 I could translate — had to in fact — this:

Paeninsularum, Sirmio, insularumque
Ocelle, quascumque in liquentibus stagnis
Marique vasto fert uterque Neptunus,
Quam te libenter quamque laetus inviso,
Vix mi ipse credens Thyniam atque Bithynos
Liquisse campos et videre te in tuto.
O quid solutis est beatius curis,
Cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
Labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto.

Translation:

O what is happier than worries released,
when the mind sets aside its burden, and we
having been exhausted from foreign labor, have come to our home,
and we rest in our longed for bed?

Our selection did not include lyrics like this one:

Hunc lucum tibi dedico, consecroque, Priape,
Qua domus tua Lampsaci est, quaque silva, Priape,
Nam te praecipue in suis urbibus colit ora
Hellespontia, caeteris ostreosior oris.

If you are curious.

And earlier:

Last night I dreamed of a Latin poem

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Neil

Really! It was this one:

Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,
et quantum est hominum venustiorum:
passer mortuus est meae puellae
passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quem plus illa oculis suis amabat.
nam mellitus erat suamque norat
ipsam tam bene quam puella matrem,
nec sese a gremio illius movebat,
sed circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc
ad solam dominam usque pipiabat.
qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.
at vobis male sit, malae tenebrae
Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis:
tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis.
o factum male! o miselle passer!
tua nunc opera meae puellae
flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli.

You will find a full translation at the link above, but here is the opening:

Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady’s sparrow is dead, the sparrow my lady’s pet, whom she loved more than her very eyes; for honey-sweet he was, and knew his mistress as well as a girl knows her own mother. Nor would he stir from her lap, but hopping now here, now there, would still chirp to his mistress alone. Now he goes along the dark road, thither whence they say no one returns. …

Shakespeare made use of some of that, you may recall. I studied Catullus in 1959 under the tuition of Edgar Bembrick in his last year teaching. I have posted about Latin and Bembrick before:

I had studied Latin at school, mainly under the legendary Edgar Bembrick – his last class in fact. He died in 1960. See also my post 1957 or MCMLVII. So Latin as my fourth subject, just for one year, looked an easy choice. Except it turned out there was so much of it! Not just Cicero, but Livy and Horace – the Epistles, with Mr Duhigg, whose Cambridge accent charmed me.

Out of curiosity I have just done a quick search, finding that Edgar Bembrick was born in 1890, appointed to Canterbury Intermediate High in 1922, retired in July 1960. He was at Sydney Boys High long before I started as a student in 1955 — he’s in a 1943 staff photo. He was ill for some of late 1959 — cancer, I think.

Here he is, second from the left, in 1951 at SBHS:

Heaven knows why I should have had such things in my dreams last night!

I see that one of my classmates, Clive Kessler, who I have mentioned before in the context of the current issues in Israel/Palestine, was in that class and translated one of the poems into English verse. So talented.

They had typos then! “Three” should be “thee”! I was one of the student proof readers in 1958, but not in 1959! Does anyone else recall galley proofs?

Clive was a formidable debater too, but not a prefect.

I was not a prefect either, though I had several close friends in that elite group, not all of whom were athletes, Rugby players or rowers… We were rather good at those in 1959 though. Among my close friends: Eric Sowey and Roger Dye. Roger was an athlete.

You would find me in the quiet confines of the Library, though under the formidable Dot Hornibrook the Library could be quite exciting. I distinctly recall her saying quite loudly one day: “I do not see how possession of a penis makes you more intelligent!” And that in 1958-9…. Feisty and rather interesting, actually…

The Library became the English Staff Room in later years — see the original bookshelves, and that was one of the Library tables. In Term 3 1985 I was back there but as a teacher — sitting at the desk by the door on the right. This photo was taken when I revisited the English staff in 2008.

And speaking of feisty women, see who was chief of the Ladies’ Auxiliary….

And just down the road from Sydney High

Morehead Street Redfern 1958 — from the video below which you may watch on YouTube.