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Subject:
RE: [NABOKV-L] False Azure, Frost: BB reply |
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From:
"Jerry Katsell" <jerry3@roadrunner.com> |
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Date:
Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:42:07 -0800 |
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To:
"'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU> |
Dear List,
Shade is an American poet who, as Brian Boyd notes, “knows French and French verse well.” Since Shade’s language is American English, I looked up “azure” in Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second Edition, first copyrighted in the early 1950s, and found: “of or like the color of a clear sky; sky blue—n. 1. sky blue or any similar blue color 2. [Poet.] the blue sky.” The azure in line two of PF can assuredly be “false” because it is reflected in the windowpane. Moonlight consists of the reflection of the sun’s rays, and is therefore “false” sunlight, in the sense that the azure in Shade’s windowpane is also “false.”
Best wishes, and warm thanks to RS Gwynn for his masterfully rendered translation of Mallarmé’s “Les fenêtres.”
Jerry Katsell