SK-B: ... am I mistook?
The singular imperative of Prendre is Prends, not Prend! 'Prends garde à
toi' is how I recall it. Or am I missing some
idiomatic quirk? And the
meaning is NOT really "Keep guard of yourself." More like BEWARE! Or RUN FOR
COVER!
Did you notice that Shade was not only "corrupted" and "terrified,"
but, blow me, ALLURED by the "forced" attentions?[...]Shade is a real weedy,
whingeing poet-taster![...] Let's face it, it all leaves a nasty taste in the
mouth. Yet James Twigg sees a contradiction with lines 103-4, where JS relishes
the "half-fish, half-honey of that golden paste."
EDNote: to my ear, this passage
resonates eerily --why?--with the following from Lolita: "My mother's elder
sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected,
served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and
housekeeper. [. . . .] I was extremely fond of her, despite the
rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make
of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father" (10). Why
"fatal rigidity"? ~SB
JM:Hochard and Andrea, not me, can say
if you're mistuck.
The translation came from the internet as a
short-cut: your "beware" warning sounds loud and clear. Shifting the
context back to Maud and Shade: is the exclamatory
"blow me" to blyme?
Fatal rigidity, ça fait rever... why fatal? why related
to a (feminine) aunt? There was something going on in the family, but
I always thought (incorrectly?) that Aunt Sybil occupied HH's mother's place in
relation to the boy and to the boy's widowed father...Not necessarily like
Kunin's Aunt Maud seducing little
Shade.