In September, NYRB Classics released its own version of Bambi, translated by Damion Searls with an afterword by Paul Reitter, author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (2015). Crucially, Zipes said on his publisher’s podcast, it was not an environmental novel. Zipes’s translation of Bambi inspired a flurry of critical interest: Publishers Weekly wrote of the story’s “dark origins,” and The Guardian called it a “dark parable.” Bambi was an allegory prefiguring the Holocaust it was, though a classic bildungsroman, not a sentimental story for children. The bird has “a twisted neck, its wings flapping feebly.” A roe deer, one Bambi hadn’t met before, mutters, “I can’t walk at the moment,” and “n the middle of talking she slumped to one side and was dead.” This carnage was scrubbed from the cartoon adaptation, of course, but the novel’s most dramatic moment, the sudden death of Bambi’s mother at the hands - or barrels, rather - of anonymous hunters, was kept intact, to many viewers’ dismay.Īccording to Jack Zipes, whose research centers on folk and fairy tales and who translated another new edition of Bambi published in February by Princeton University Press, a lot else was lost in Disney’s translation, including the nuances of Viennese society and the power structures that might have occupied Salten - specifically, the anti-Semitism he faced all his life, leading him to change his name from Siegmund Salzmann.

A “dying pheasant” convulses in the snow after humans raid the forest and meadow. In Bambi, Salten’s reportage often turns toward scenes of violence. But, as he wrote, “Bambi would never have come into being if I had never aimed my bullet at the head of a roebuck or elk.” He was also a hunter, criticized for his pastime by his contemporaries. Salten was a journalist, a theater critic, a short story writer, and, after publishing Bambi, the author of several other novels told from animals’ points of view, including Perri: The Youth of a Squirrel (1938), Bambi’s Children: The Story of a Forest Family (1939), and Renni the Rescuer: A Dog of the Battlefield (1940). “Tall maples, beeches, and oaks formed a green roof over the thicket, and ferns, vetches, and sage sprang from the firm dark soil.” “Blackthorn bushes and hazelnut, dogwood, and young elder trees grew all around,” Salten writes of the titular roe deer’s stretch of woods. The natural world is often portrayed frankly, in a tone of reportage so detailed it seems to reveal an obsession. IN FELIX SALTEN’S NOVEL Bambi - published in Berlin in 1923 and cutesified by Disney in 1942, around the same time that its author, whose work had by then been banned by the Nazis, fled Austria to Zurich with his family - there isn’t a single woodland creature with glistening eyes.

Bambi author felix