I will talk in terms of the first chapter, which I translated in its entirety. Here, however, is the first paragraph of the work.
I primi date di questa nostra storia consistono, molto modestamente, nella descrizione di una vita famigliare. Si tratta di una famiglia piccolo borghese: piccolo borghese in senso ideologico, non in senso economico. E infatti il caso di persone molto ricche, che abitano a Milano. Crediamo che non sia difficile per il lettore immaginare come queste persone vivano; come si comportino nei loro rapporti col loro ambiente (che e quello appunto della ricca borghesia industriale), come agiscano nella loro cerchia famigliare, e cosi via. Crediamo inoltre che non sia neanche difficule(consentendoci quindi di evitare certi non nuovi particolari di costume) immmaginare a una a una queste persone: non si tratta, infatti, in nessum modo di persone eccezionali ma di persone piu o meno medie. [translation at end of this text]
One of Pasolini's aims in this work was to bring into the foreground certain arbitrary aspects of the process of the construction of a story. He employs a particularly phatic register in this text, repeatedly implicating the reader -- with phrases such as "Allowing ourselves to skip over certain no doubt familiar details of dress style". That ["consentendoci....] implies that the reader will already have a body of knowledge to bring to bear on the subject and will willingly enter into a certain if not judgmental at least observatory stance toward the characters and their sartorial habits.
The tone is one of detachment, an observer is describing the social and physical environment, setting a kind of naturalistic stage, then introducing characters onto it; this voice uses an analytical diction; it seems to be striving for precision and clarity. The second and third sentences (beginning with "Si tratta ....) "We are concerned here with a petit bourgeouis family: petit bourgeouis in the ideological sense not the economic one, for in fact these persons are quite rich ...." show this measured precision.
The text continues to move in careful increments. There is a good deal of physical description, mostly of a neutral nature, although a phrase is occasionally inserted so aestheticized as to seem ironic in contrast to what surrounds it. For example, the walls of the factory are described as “tender green like the pale azure of the sky".
Despite these touches, Pasolini's overall prose style here has a flatness like the prose of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novels, purged of certain habits generally encountered in speech or writing. This is not easy to pinpoint on the statistical level, particularly from a small sample. It is a longer term consistency that builds the effect.
Some of the prose's characteristics include: a precise renderings of physical detail, (the specifying of poplars lining the road, as opposed to simply "trees"), the rendering of spatial relationships and geographical details with neutral language, ("the road that leads to Milan"), avoidance of emotion-laden adjectives that might evoke mood or anthropomorphize in any way (no "brooding" poplars here); in fact there is less detailing of the qualities of light, for instance (which is something one might expect from a film-maker because it has been long associated with and used in establishing mood.) The fog mentioned is simply a fact of local climate, not a mood-setting device.
It is largely by what is not done that I can locate the style of this text. The workers' movements are not individualized but form part of a larger temporal description (they are not "glad to be on lunch break" or "eager" or even moving "hurriedly".) Even when there is a detailed description of a man, it is rigorously maintained as an external view, pointing to its own speculative nature.
Some "deviations": The word persone used repeatedly in preference to what might seem the more obvious colloquial choice gente (people). Reading the text the first few times, it struck me that a normal text or speaker might try to avoid this repetition. Then again, this avoidance of re-use of words is a current American stylistic phobia; I'm not sure that it is an unacceptable level of repetition to use such a common word three or four times in Italian. Repetitions figure in this book on a more structural, overall level -- suonano le campane di mezzogiorno is repeated within structure of whole book at the introduction of the main characters and again later in the book.
Some constructions seem to be a bit forced: "Accompanied by the quasi- military salutes of the guards, a Mercedes rolls out of the factory's main gate" would seem to me to be a more easily digested formulation than the form it takes in the text, calling less attention to itself. But this may be purely a matter of taste and not associated with any particular significance (like the two pronunciations of “either” in English or of “Aout” in French.) Furthermore, Italian even more than English gives a good deal of latitude as to word order in a sentence, there are often several possible grammatical ways to structure the same words into a sentence having the same meaning.
The sentences of this first chapter do seem almost unnecessarily long -- although long complex sentences with many nested subjunctive clauses are a common feature of much written and even spoken Italian, so that again, there is no radical, easily pointed out disjuncture between the language of this text and that of everyday discourse in standard Italian.
Novels begin in a variety of ways. There are some well-established opening moves: beginning in media res of some dramatic moment or action, beginning by establishing an inner state of a character, beginning with physical description (the establishing shot in cinema) and so on. What Pasolini is setting up in this opening passage is a point of view, an attitude. It is one of analysis.
This book, which was also made into a film, is an attempt at a kind of modern myth. A "mythic" stranger (he has no history, he is "mysterious") comes into the lives of a rich Milanese family and enchants them all; in the course of events he makes love with the mother, the father, the daughter, the son and each of them in their way is ultimately shattered by the experience. This is an indictment of their shallow, empty lives, their inability to come face to face with a transcendent reality, with something not mediated or controllable in their terms (by money). On the other hand the servant of the family, who also in her turn is seduced by the irresistible visitor, undergoes positive transformation and returns to her village. There is, to me, a very ambiguous final scene where she is willingly buried alive in a state of transfigured ecstasy ... but this is not the place to go into counter-interpretations of the film, I just wanted to outline the basic dramatic structure.
I realize I could easily have argued the opposite case: that there is a fairly particularized use of language here, that each sentence of my small sample carries over, as it were, a significant word from the previous sentence; that there is some sound play ["molto modestamente"] and so on. But maybe I am just tuning in more and more obsessively to the language by virtue of this forced focus. I am all too able to see the contradictory sides of whatever I am discussing which is a dizzying distraction and makes for revisions, painful re-examinations of the same ground from alternative points of view, and leads to ceaseless toil.
Translation:
The first givens of our story consist, quite modestly, of the description of a family life. What we have is a petit bourgeois family -- petit bourgeois not in the economic but in the ideological sense. In fact those with whom we are dealing are, in this case, very rich persons who live in Milan. It will not be difficult for the reader to imagine how these people live or how they behave in relation to their environment (which is precisely that of the wealthy industrial bourgeoisie), how they act within their family circle, and so on. Even if we skip over certain details of apparel, bound to be well-known, it will still be possible for the reader to imagine them, for we are not dealing with exceptional but more or less average people here.
The noon bells ring. They are the bells of nearby Lainate or Varese. With the sound of the bells are mingled the discreet, almost sweet, screams of the sirens.
A factory takes up the whole horizon, made misty by the slight fog that not even the noonday light manages to disperse, with walls of a green as tender as the azure wash of the sky. The season might be Spring or the beginning of Fall, or both at once, because our story doesn't have a chronological structure; but the branches of the poplars which surround this plain in long regular rows, the branches are bare, or have barely sprouted or could their leaves be withered? At the midday signal the workers begin pouring out of the factory and the rows of hundreds of parked cars come to life.
Against this background the first character of our tale comes on the scene. Out of the factory's main gate -- accompanied by the quasi-military salutes of the guards -- rolls a Mercedes. Inside the car is a man with a sweet and preoccupied face, the slightly spent face of one who has concerned himself his whole life with nothing but business and, perhaps a bit desultorily, sports; he is the owner, or at least the main shareholder, of the factory. Between forty and fifty years old, he is youthful, with a tanned face, barely graying hair, and the still muscular and agile body of someone who has since his youth engaged in sports. He gazes into space, with a worried or bored or perhaps merely inexpressive look which is thus inscrutable. These solemn comings and goings from the factory are for him simply a habit. He has the air of a man immersed in his own life. Having the fates of so many others depend upon him has rendered him rather aloof, mysterious. But it's a mystery without subtlety or depth.
The limousine, leaving behind this factory – which appears to be as long as the horizon and seemingly suspended in the sky -- pulls onto the newly built road that runs between the old poplar groves and leads to Milan.
--------------------------- NOTES:
1. Dati = given, facts, data. One might legitimately choose "opening facts" for instance, or "preliminary information". Two aspects warrant my choice of "given". One is the political dimension of Pasolini's oeuvre evident even here in his seemingly detached aesthetic language; the second aspect is the quality of stage directions about this passage, a setting up or "giving" of a scene (in contrast, presumably, to what the reader brings to it or concludes from it.)
2. ‘Questra nostra’ technically is "this our" would be “this story of ours” but in English this makes for a slight redundancy not present in the Italian. I settle on "our story" because Pasolini's choices throughout suggest an attempt generally to bring into the foreground certain arbitrary aspects of the process of the construction of a story rather than of the language itself.
3. The word used is persone and it is used repeatedly in preference to what might seem the more obvious colloquial choice gente (people). Thus I conclude that Pasolini wants to emphasize the discreteness of his characters, perhaps their alienation. I may be reading too much into this choice of his and would have to read the entire book and correlate the word choice and repetitions before making a final decision. In a sense, I am forced at this point to choose between "beauty" of language (or how I would write it) vs. fidelity to an intention I am only surmising at this point.
4. In Italian no differentiation is made between an ongoing action and one continued over time (though there is a spoken form for it...) I study languages..." vs. "I am washing the dishes..." Thus "ring" and "are ringing" are formed in the same way. An English inversion to follow the Italian here would be archaic, ultra poetic: "They ring, the bells of noon." not suited to PPP's limpid, flat style -- though whether it's flat or limpid might be a matter for debate among those who do or don't appreciate the aims of the nouveau roman with which his style here (and that of other other neo-realists, notably Natalia Ginzburg) has much affinity. The style calls attention to itself in the sense of its utter simplicity and in Pasolini's case, a certain archness or deliberate artificiality intended to call into question the procedures of constructing narrative. Back to my problem: "The bells ring" feels blunt in English and loses the drawn- out feeling of its rhythm in Italian, the ongoing quality. Furthermore, Pasolini will use the same phrase, suonano le campane di mezzogiorno, to begin the next two chapters, which are also introductions of the personages of his "play".
5. Factory whistles. Is this potentially unclear here? I was confused when I first read it. The word "sirens" has the same multiple meanings in Italian as it does in English (eg: ambulance, factory whistle, sea maidens who lure sailors to their death, etc.)
6. I repeat the word here because in English there is ambiguity as to the subject of the parenthesis -- which in any case is rather long (it violates the 7-plus-or-minus two rule). In Italian fabbrica is feminine and orizzonte is masculine so the parenthesis clearly refers to horizon, since it is in gender agreement with it.
7. I also consider the choices: "order" and "sequence".
8. "A Mercedes rolls out of the factory's main gate accompanied by the quasi-military salutes of the guards”, a " would seem to me to be a more easily digested formulation in English, calling less attention to itself; but I try not to make arbitrary changes.
9. Alle spalle means literally "at its shoulders", an idiom, what is behind one in several senses of the phrase.
10. I'm not sure how to render the subtleties of Pasolini's shifts from "this" to "that" to "the" as articles preceding "factory". And I would need to ascertain how deliberate they were or to be more exact how consistent they remained over the course of the entire work to decide on a consistent strategy for rendering them in English and how much the nuances mattered.