Felix Salten, Bambi
NYRB Classics, 2022
Bambi first came out in Vienna a hundred years ago, the work of a Viennese litterateur, journalist, Zionist, pornographer, and man about town, and it was an immediate success with readers. An English translation (by Whittaker Chambers(!?) and with an introduction by Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy) soon appeared: it was well reviewed and sold half a million copies. When Walt Disney made his famous movie of the book, Salten’s intimate, delicate, poetic, and gripping tale of forest life came to be seen as a children’s book—it certainly is one that children can enjoy, but it is also a moving and lasting contribution to the literature of the natural world.
In this new translation, Bambi and his mother, the groves and thickets of the forest, the open and dangerous space of the great field, the ever-present threat of the human—the whole intricate weave of life and death that Salten handles so deftly—come alive for a new generation of readers.
Bambi is a delicious book. Delicious not only for children but for those who are no longer so fortunate. For delicacy of perception and essential truth I hardly know of any story of animals that can stand beside this life study of a forest deer. Felix Salten is a poet.
— John Galsworthy
Thanks to a new translation from Damion Searls…, Salten’s name and prose and the true, complex spirit of Bambi are finally restored.
— Farah Abdessamad, The [New York] Observer