Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0018062, Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:37:35 -0300

Subject
Re: de fencing lessons
From
Date
Body
L. Hochard: "prends garde De toi doesn't mean anything in French..."

C.Kunin: Habanera, be damned! I needs most humbly and publicly beg both your pardons ...

JM: The present subject's heading is "de fencing lessons" and now we pass onto "garden fencing" in place of "en garde fencing"! Thank you for your clarificatio, L.Hochard. Off-list, Andrea offered additional information: The "s" is dropped when using imperative in the 2nd person singular, and the verb garder takes "à" rather than "de" as a preposition in the context you quote."

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?

JM:Hochard and Andrea, not me, can say if you're mistuck.

Andrea Pitzer [to Stan] You are not mistook at all. I wrote Jansy off-list [...] in a fit of caffeine-free delerium, and should now throw myself under the bus with Carolyn. Suffice it to say that <<Prends>> is correct, not <<prend>> and that the entirety of the line I zipped off to Jansy was addled. But as Laurence noted, Jansy was correct on the preposition involved.

Dmitri Nabokov: Carmen: the [correct] French of the score, which I happen to have, is "prends garde à toi", colloquially translatable as "watch your white ass."

JM: Let's proceed to Shadian garden fences, then? Of the kind implied by Stan under "That's all, Folks?"

Sergei Soloviev: The name "Ada" itself (and surely, there is a distraction) has such hellish connotations in Russian (after all, Ad means Hell) that it provoked many jokes. I remember from soviet times a joke about the programming language "ADA" that was invented (the joke said) as a hellish opposite to the Gorbatchev's wife Raya (diminutif of Raissa) - Rai in Russian meaning "paradise".
JM: The paths to hell are lined with primroses?

No more time to cut and paste former postings but...Salzman/D.Z-- Bell/Zuckerman/C.Kunin-- Miller//Salesman/ Irena Ksiezopolska
- - Herzog//Bellow/Mike Donohue ...
In the Nabokov spirit, mightn't they've been all blended into one? ( the Herzog//Duke/Statue, often mentioned by VN, is still puzzling for me in the present context ) I skipped and lost J.F's remark taken up later by C.Kunin, a running-late rabbit.




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