The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten Monica Strauss Felix Salten, The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Alenka Sottler. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2022. 162 pp. The cover of this new translation of Felix Salten's Bambi by Jack Zipes imparts several competing messages. The title—The Original Bambi—steers prospective readers away from any lingering memories of the very popular Disney film that usurped Salten's vision. On the other hand, illustrator Alenka Sottler's frontal view of a long-lashed young fawn that graces the cover has not entirely let go of Disney's sugary interpretation. And although Salten did not intend Bambi to be a children's book, the bright green cloth binding of this Princeton University Press edition suggests otherwise. Bambi, which first appeared in serial form in Vienna's Neue Freie Presse between August and October 1922, was then published by Ullstein in 1923 and by Zsolnay in 1926. The book proved to be extremely popular and in 1928 was picked up by Simon and Schuster as one of its first literary ventures. The English translation, which was done by the 29-year-old Whittaker Chambers (later renowned for his activities as a Communist spy and then fierce anti-Communist), was so successful that it became the initial choice of the newly created Book-of-the-Month Club. With the premiere of Disney's Bambi in 1942, however, both Salten's authorship and Chambers's role as the essential linguistic go-between were completely overshadowed. Now Professor Zipes, a translator of German folk and fairy tales, has taken the opportunity of the lapse of Chambers's copyright to re-introduce Bambi, hoping both to give Salten his due and to improve on Chambers' effort. Aligning himself with those scholars who have seen Bambi as an allegory of the plight of the Jews, Professor Zipes opens his lengthy introduction with a comparison between the situation of the Jews in Austria and that of the animals in the forest. "As a Jew, [Salten] also knew what it meant to be pursued and killed. He knew how difficult it was to assimilate and play by the rules of a society that he and his ancestors had not created" (x). This is a far-fetched projection. Bambi was written in 1922 when Salten was one of Vienna's most popular and successful literary figures. And, surely, he did not know what it meant to be "pursued," if not killed, until the Anschluss sixteen years later. This radical opening sets the tone of the concise biography of Salten's early years that follows. Zipes emphasizes his outsider role among the more [End Page 115] privileged writers of the Griensteidl circle. His father's financial failures led to his having to grow up in a working-class district where he was often subjected to antisemitic bullying. Though he went out to work early and did not attend university, he was nevertheless publishing poems and stories before he was 20 and by 1894, age 25, was the theater critic of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung. Any biographer of Salten must wrestle with the essential contradiction between Salten's passion for hunting and his imaginative rendering of its threat to the animals themselves. Zipes hazards the guess that the careful stalking of prey required of a hunter gave Salten the insights into the real life in the forest as opposed to the idealized one of those who never ventured as far or as deep. In 2015, Sabine Struemper-Krobb published a detailed critique of Chambers's translation and concluded that it "simplified the novel, especially by reducing its transcendental dimension." She suggested that this reduction made for a greater emphasis on the "private, secular character of the natural world" and hence led the way to Disney's "radical rewriting." Zipes quotes Struemper-Krobb's reservations in his introductions but adds his own provisos. Chambers, he insists, fails to "capture a Viennese style of writing […] mistranslates idioms, omits phrases" (xviii). In Bambi's Forest, Salten has the animals communicate in the same manner as...