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Modern Italy
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI
Anno XVI , n° 2, Dicembre 1998 ( Contributi ) pag. 160-184
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE OCCASION IN
NELLE NOZZE DELLA SORELLA PAOLINA
DAVID CASTRONUOVO
Middlebury College,
Middlebury, Vermont
All literary works are occasioned in some sense; occasional verse differs in having not a private but a public or social occasion.
(Miner et al., 851)

What is poetry's relationship to its occasion? Does poetry imitate it? Merely complement or report it? Recreate it? Create a parallel occasion? Supplant it? Does poetry compensate for it, create the occasion where history neglected or failed to? Or is poetry rather constitutive of the occasion it appears to describe?
(Sugano, 13)

Premise

Among the titles of the Canti, surely none suggests the idea of occasional verse more clearly than Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina (Oct.-Nov. 1821), which proposes the theme of a brother's remarks on the "occasion" of his sister's marriage (in point of fact, never
celebrated)1. As is well-known, however, we cannot discern the poem's true matter from its title. In his "Preambolo alla ristampa delle 'Annotazioni' nel Nuovo Ricoglitore di Milano" of 1825, Leopardi himself explains that "[N]essun potrebbe indovinare i soggetti delle Canzoni2 dai titoli; anzi per lo più il poeta fino al primo verso entra in materie differentissime da quello che il lettore si sarebbe aspettato.
Per esempio, una Canzone per nozze, non parla né di talamo né di zona né di Venere né di Imene" (Damiani and Rigoni, 1. 163, emphasis added). Thus the poet insists that the title of his "Canzone per nozze" prepares us misleadingly for an encounter with social phonomena such as conjugal myths ("Venere," "Imene") and rituals ("talamo", "zona") that are not present in the text. We may therefore expect to take the Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina author at his word, and find in the entire canzone that which Luigi Blasucci describes as a "divaricazione" between title and text (p.159). [...]
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