The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is a new, more precise translation of Salten’s original by Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. The translation sold well but was eclipsed by Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942), an eclipse probably prolonged by a questionable interpretation of US copyright law. It debuted in America in 1928 as Bambi, a Life in the Woods, translated by none other than Whittaker Chambers, already a communist, but not yet in the Soviet agent phase of his astoundingly protean career. Felix Salten wrote Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde in Vienna, where it appeared as a newspaper serial in 1922 before being published in book form in Germany the following year. In fact, I didn’t even know that the film had been preceded by a novel. If it had, I would not have expected that its story and backstory would, among other surprises, include the Nazis, a communist, pornography and talking leaves. It never occurred to me that one day, I would review Bambi (the novel).
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