Dear List,
Inspite of the etymology, when we describe anything as "celestial" ( also, as heavenly) we do not necessarily imply it is "blue". In Russian, as Fet describes, azure is indeed used as a synonum of sky ( I ask: is it also a synonym for heaven?)
In his book "Worlds in Regression" DBJohnson*
described the importance of the sound "Bl" ( as in sibling,Zembla, blue).
In many European languages the color retains
the "bl" sound ( blau, bleu, blue, blauw,blu. In Spanish and Portuguese,
"azul" ).
Several times the word "blue" in Shade's
verses favor "azure", not always indicating "sky":
1.By the false azure
in the windowpane;2. the three young people
stood/ Before the azure
entrance for awhile.3.one
of the three heraldic creatures (the other two being respectively a reindeer
proper and a merman azure, crined or);4. I guess he was heading for the
Côte d’Azur...(etc);5. a son who
eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella
Lazurchik; 6. The
poor poet ...lay with open dead eyes directed up at the sunny evening
azure.
Would VN be suggesting something special when he chose "azure", not "blue"?
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Charles H Wallace
wrote,FEb.2007 : Azure means blue. Only secondarily does it connote
sky. A thing is either blue, or it isn't. It can't be "falsely" blue.
G.Shimanovich: Azure is a blue of a clear
sky. It is also noun. As such ‘false azure’ makes sense. Not so clunky, not so
easily.
Victor Fet: At least in Russian poetry "azure" ("lazur' ") used as
a noun often means sky, being a standard poetic cliche'.
An expanded version of this cliche' is "azure of
skies" ["lazur' nebes'], or "sky azure" ["nebesnaya
lazur'"] ...
However, very often "azure" is used
as a synonym of sky.
Jansy M: ...in one of PF's translations I
found "false azure" being interpreted as "deceiving
blueness".
C.Kunin:Is the sky itself, then "truly" blue? ...In
butterfly wings the blue color is produced by the angle at which the scales lay.
Duncan White: one
of the meanings of the noun azure is the type of blue that we see in an
unclouded sky - it is not a secondary meaning, the two are bound up together in
Shade's usage. Here's the OED: Azure: The clear blue colour of the unclouded
sky, or of the sea reflecting it. The azure is "false" because it is not the
real sky, but a reflection of it in the window pane.
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*- On a different topic, in May 8,2005, D.B.Johnson wrote: The question of why Homer called the [sea] wine-dark is a vexed one and there is no definitive answer. The word in Greek is oinops -- purpureum is a Latin word and just confuses the issue... It is important too to remember that it is a poetic epithet and such epithets became, for reasons of meter, more or less welded to their noun and will often appear whether they are appropriate to the context or not... The theory that the Greeks lacked words for certain colors ...(propounded first I believe by Julian Jaynes) is considered to be pretty far-fetched. The classical Greeks, as opposed to those of Homer's time, certainly had a word for blue, kuanous, the same as our word cyan...The whole spectrum of Greek colors is by no means a congruent match with our conceptions of what is meant by the same color-words.