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False Azure, CHW reply to BB
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BB wrote:
The point is that James Marcus offered only one example of what was wrong
about the poem "Pale Fire," without explanation or discussion, and that the
example actually indicates the poem’s customary strengths rather than its
supposed weaknesses.
The real point, in fact, is that Marcus was so astounded by Rosenbaum’s
unexplained assertions, that Pale Fire: “is one of the most underrated American
poems of the past century....... In fact, taken on its own, it surpasses
in every respect anything that Frost has ever done. Deal with it, Frostians,”
that he tossed off a quick aside in his blog, and moved on. The simple truth
is that Rosenbaum’s comparison of Shade with Frost here is just silly, and
Marcus justifiably replied in kind.
Charles, ready to dismiss “Pale Fire,” was happy to concur that Marcus’s
sole proffered example was yet another wrong note, though he hadn’t thought it
one before:
Azure means blue. Only secondarily does it connote sky. A thing is either
blue, or it isn't. It can't be "falsely" blue. Shade's English is not as
precise as VN's, and a poet should not allow himself to be so sloppy --- unless
it's with deliberate aesthetic intent.
Brian imputes to me a position I do not hold, and didn’t express. I
explicitly said that because Marcus made sense in other respects, I thought I’d have
a stab at trying to understand what he found wrong with “false azure”.
Reluctant to concur, all I did was make a suggestion. Brian crudely misrepresents
my approach to this point.
In fact Duncan White’s posting, and the OED, showed this “explanation” of
the wrong note to be wrong itself. "The clear blue of the unclouded sky" (OED)
is exactly what Shade wants (and exactly what Nabokov wants, at another
level, through the connection to "Our blue inenubilable Zembla"; although this
overtone is irrelevant to the quality of Shade's poem, the quality of the poem
in itself AND what Nabokov does on top of that offer a measure of the whole
novel's achievement).
The truth is that Duncan White selectively chose not the first definition
from the OED, but the fourth. The OED actually has 1) The precious stone lapis
lazuli; 2) A bright blue pigment or dye; 3) The blue colour in coats of arms;
4) The clear blue colour of the unclouded sky. The OED does not even support
the idea that, in English, the word azure is a synonym, accepted by
sustained usage, for the sky itself. I see no reason not to stand by what I said:
Only secondarily does azure connote sky.
Assuming that the poem sucks, adopting an a priori attitude of dismissal,
leads one to welcome other supposed weaknesses without examining what the poem
actually does: in this case the poet, far from being sloppy, chooses a word
whose dictionary sense alone makes it a mot juste.
Brian again imputes to me a position I do not hold, and didn’t express. He
adopts a brow-beating debating manner, without scruples. It is simply not true
that the fourth OED definition, let alone the first, makes it the mot juste.
I am not dishonest enough to assert that it may not be justifiable for
other reasons. Quote: “I agree with Duncan, however, that this particular example
is probably not sloppy enough to fuss over.”
Doubly juste, in fact. Let me quote my Pale Fire book, 282n.5: "The 'azure'
of the poem's opening couplet also clearly engages with Stéphane Mallarmé's
recurrent image of the 'Azur," representing the Ideal, as opposed to the ‘
Ici-bas,' the here-below, the here and now, in such poems as 'L'Azur,"
'Retourneur,' 'Le Soupir' and especially the most important of these early poems, "Les
Fenêtres." [And let me add now that our subject is precisely the "azure of
the windowpane."] Nabokov recalled that 'ce n'est pas Coppée ou Lamartine,
mais Verlaine et Mallarmé, qui prirent soin de mon adolescence [it wasn't Coppée
or Lamartine, but Verlaine and Mallarmé, who took care of my adolescence]."
Like Nabokov, Shade knows French and French verse well. In view of Mallarmé's
concern with what Renato Poggioli calls "the attendant falling back of the
soul from . . . azur to what he named ici-bas," like the waxwing’s fall from
the false azure, Shade has perfectly integrated his own metaphysical questing
with that of poetic tradition. And as so often, he alludes with precision but
without the display of modernist poetic mosaicism.
Alexey Sklyarenko wrote: By the way, lozhnaia lazur', as Vera Nabokov
accurately renders this phrase ("false azure") in her (unrhymed) literal
translation of Shade's poem, sounds wonderful to my tin ear. Victor Fet wrote: At
least in Russian poetry "azure" ("lazur'") used as a noun often means sky,
being a standard poetic cliché. Perhaps John Shade was more multilingual than I’d
assumed from the way he is otherwise described in the novel, and is
consciously making all these Franco-Russian allusions, dredged from his capacious
reading memory. However, he is writing verse in English, and “azure” as a
synonym for “sky”, in English, still smacks of the poetastic cliché. “Blue”, in
similar usage, is also a cliché in English: “The Wild Blue Yonder, Into The
Blue, etc. Just for a lark, I flipped through Frost’s collected poems to see
if he’d ever used the word “azure”. Although I can’t be certain, I’m
willing to place a small bet that he didn’t use it once, in the sense of "sky" or
in any other sense. He is guilty of the occasional lapse, particularly in his
earliest collection, A Boy’s Will, (eg “zephyr”, “on noiseless wings”) but “
azure” isn’t one of them. My impression is that his second collection,
North of Boston, eschews this sort of thing with exemplary rigour. The fact is
that Frost became an absolute master of English poetry and the English
language, and John Shade wasn’t. I don’t deny that he may well be an exceedingly
ingenious fabricator of verbal puzzles. Ultimately this isn’t poetry, as I
understand poetry.
Brian subsequently veers off into prolonged justifications for Shade’s use
of “azure”, including a long disquisition on Richard Wilbur, and China, but
it would have been more constructive if he’d have addressed his fine attention
to the specific points I’ve outlined above, without distorting or speciously
denigrating my meaning. I’m not yet ready to lie down with open dead eyes
directed up at the sunny evening azure.
Charles
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