Bambi, a Life in the Woods
Bambi,
a Life in the Woods (German
title: Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde) is a 1923 Austrian
coming-of-age
novel written by Felix Salten
and originally published in Berlin by Ullstein
Verlag. The novel traces the life of
Bambi, a male roe deer,
from his birth through childhood, the loss of his mother, the finding of a
mate, the lessons he learns from his father, and the experience he gains about
the dangers posed by human hunters in the forest.
An
English translation by Whittaker Chambers
was published in North America by Simon
& Schuster in 1928,[1]
and the novel has since been translated and published in over 30 languages
around the world. Salten published a sequel, Bambi's
Children, in 1939.
The
novel was well received by critics and is considered a classic, as well as one
of the first environmental
novels. It was adapted into a theatrical animated film, Bambi, by Walt Disney Productions in 1942, two Russian live-action adaptations in 1985 and
1986, a ballet in 1987, and a stage production in 1998. Another ballet
adaptation was created by an Oregon troupe, but never premiered. Janet Schulman
published a children's picture book adaptation in 2000 that featured realistic
oil paintings and many of Salten's original words.
Plot
Bambi
is a roe
deer fawn born in a thicket in late spring one year. Over the course of the summer, his
mother teaches him about the various inhabitants of the forest and the ways
deer live. When she feels he is old enough, she takes him to the meadow which he learns is both a wonderful but also dangerous
place as it leaves the deer exposed and in the open. After some initial fear
over his mother's caution, Bambi enjoys the experience. On a subsequent trip,
Bambi meets his Aunt Ena, and her twin fawns Faline and Gobo. They quickly
become friends and share what they have learned about the forest. While they
are playing, they encounter princes, male deer, for the first time. After the
stags leave, the fawns learn that those were their fathers, but that the
fathers rarely stay with or speak to the females and young.
As
Bambi grows older, his mother begins to leave him alone. While searching for
her one day, Bambi has his first encounter with "He" - the animals'
term for humans - which terrifies him. The man raises a firearm and aims at
him; Bambi flees at top speed, joined by his mother. After he is scolded by a
stag for crying for his mother, Bambi gets used to being alone at times. He
later learns the stag is called the "Old Prince", the oldest and
largest stag in the forest who is known for his cunning and aloof nature.
During the winter, Bambi meets Marena, a young doe, Nettla, an old doe who no
longer bears young, and two princes, Ronno and Karus. Mid-winter, hunters enter
the forest, killing many animals including Bambi's mother. Gobo also disappears
and is presumed dead.
After
this, the novel skips ahead a year, noting that Bambi, now a young adult, was
cared for by Nettla and that when he got his first set of antlers he was abused
and harassed by the other males. It is summer and Bambi is now sporting his
second set of antlers. He is reunited with his cousin Faline. After he battles
and defeats first Karus then Ronno, Bambi and Faline fall in love with each
other. They spend a great deal of time together. During this time, the old
Prince saves Bambi's life when he nearly runs towards a hunter imitating a
doe's call. This teaches the young buck to be cautious about blindly rushing
toward any deer's call. During the summer, Gobo returns to the forest having
been raised by a man who found him collapsed in the snow during the hunt where
Bambi's mother was killed. While his mother and Marena welcome him and
celebrate him as a "friend" of man, the old Prince and Bambi pity
him. Marena becomes his mate, but several weeks later Gobo is killed when he
approaches a hunter in the meadow, falsely believing the halter he wore would
keep him safe from all men.
As
Bambi continues to age, he begins spending most of his time alone, including
avoiding Faline though he still loves her in a melancholic way. Several times
he meets with the old Prince who teaches him about snares, shows him how to free another animal from one, and
encourages him not to use trails, to avoid the traps of men. When Bambi is
later shot by a hunter, the Prince shows him how to walk in circles to confuse
the man and his dogs until the bleeding stops, then takes him to a safe place
to recover. They remain together until Bambi is strong enough to leave the safe
haven again. When Bambi has grown gray and is "old", the old Prince
shows him that man is not all-powerful by showing him the dead body of a man
who was shot and killed by another man. When Bambi confirms that he now
understands that "He" is not all-powerful, and that there is
"Another" over all creatures, the stag tells him that he has always
loved him and calls him "my son" before leaving.
At
the end of the novel, Bambi meets with twin fawns who are calling for their
mother and he scolds them for not being able to stay alone. After leaving them,
he thinks to himself that the girl fawn reminded him of Faline, and that the
male was promising and that Bambi hoped to meet him again when he was grown.
Publication history
Felix
Salten, himself an avid hunter,[2][3] penned Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde
after World War I,
targeting an adult audience.[4] The novel was first published in Vienna in serialized form
in the Neue Freie Presse newspaper from 15 August to 21 October 1922,[5] and as a book in Germany by Ullstein
Verlag in 1923, and republished in 1926 in
Vienna.[6][7]
Translations
Max Schuster,
a co-founder of Simon
& Schuster, became intrigued with the novel
and contracted with the author to publish it in North America.[citation needed] Clifton
Fadiman, an editor at the firm, engaged his
Columbia University classmate Whittaker Chambers
to translate it.[8] Simon & Schuster published this first English edition
in 1928, with illustrations by Kurt
Wiese, under the title Bambi: A Life
in the Woods.[6][9] The New York Times praised the prose as
"admirably translated".[10] The New York Herald Tribune did not comment on the
translation.[9] The scholar Sabine Strümper-Krobb characterizes the
translation as simplified, saying Chambers inscribed the book with cultural and
ideological values of the American society, stressing family values and
reducing transcendental ones.[11]
Chambers’
translation has been reprinted repeatedly with different illustrations until
the 2010s. A new English translation by Hannah Correll was published in 2019.[12]
Over
200 editions of the novel have been published, with almost 100 German and
English editions alone, and numerous translations and reprintings in over 30
languages.[13] It has also been published in a variety of formats,
including printed medium, audiobook, Braille,
and E-book formats.[14] The original German edition was unillustrated, but since
then, several illustrations have been created.
Copyright dispute
When
Salten originally published Bambi in 1923, he did so under Germany's
copyright laws, which required no statement that the novel was copyrighted. In
the 1926 republication, he did include a United States copyright notice, so the
work is considered to have been copyrighted in the United States in 1926. In
1936, Salten sold some film rights to the novel to MGM producer Sidney Franklin who passed them on to Walt Disney
for the creation of a film adaptation. After Salten's death in 1945, his
daughter Anna Wyler inherited the copyright and renewed the novel's copyrighted
status in 1954 (U.S. copyright law in effect at the time provided for an
initial term of 28 years from the date of first publication in the U.S., which
could be extended for an additional 28 years provided the copyright holder
filed for renewal before the expiration of the initial copyright). In 1958, she
formulated three agreements with Disney regarding the novel's rights. Upon her
death in 1977, the rights passed to her husband, Veit Wyler, and her children,
who held on to them until 1993 when he sold the rights to the publishing house
Twin Books. Twin Books and Disney disagreed on the terms and validity of
Disney's original contract with Anna Wyler and Disney's continued use of the
Bambi name.[7]
When
the two companies were unable to reach a solution, Twin Books filed suit
against Disney for copyright infringement. Disney argued that because Salten's
original 1923 publication of the novel did not include a copyright notice, by
American law it was immediately considered a public
domain work. It also argued that as the
novel was published in 1923, Anna Wyler's 1954 renewal occurred after the
deadline and was invalid.[7][15] The case was reviewed by the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California, which ruled that the novel was copyrighted upon its
publication in 1923, and not a public domain work then. However, in validating
1923 as the publication date, this confirmed Disney's claim that the copyright
renewal was filed too late and the novel became a public domain work in 1951.[7]
Twin
Books appealed the decision, and in March 1996 the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
reversed the original decision, stating that the novel was a foreign work in
1923 that was not in its home country's public domain when published, therefore
the original publication date could not be used in arguing American copyright
law. Instead, the 1926 publication date, the first in which it specifically
declared itself to be copyrighted in the United States, is considered the year
when the novel was copyrighted in America. Anna Wyler's renewal was therefore
timely and valid, and Twin Books' ownership of the copyright was upheld.[15]
The
Twin Books decision is still regarded as controversial by many copyright
experts.[16][17] David Nimmer,
in a 1998 article, argued that the Twin Books ruling meant that an
ancient Greek epic, if only published outside the U.S. without the required formalities, would be eligible for copyright protection. Although
Nimmer concluded that Twin Books required this finding (within the Ninth
Circuit), he characterized the result as "patently absurd."[18]
The
American copyright of the novel is currently set to expire on January 1, 2022,[16] while in Austria and other countries of the European
Union it entered the public
domain on January 1, 2016.
Sequel
Main article: Bambi's
Children
While
living in exile in Switzerland, after being forced to flee Nazi-occupied Austria, Salten wrote a sequel to Bambi
that follows the birth and lives of Bambi's twin offspring, Geno and Gurri.[19] The young fawns interact with various deer, and are
educated and watched over by Bambi and Faline as they grow. They also learn
more about the ways of man, including both hunters and the gamekeeper seeking
to protect the deer. Due to Salten's exiled status — he had lost his Austrian
publisher Paul Zsolnay Verlag
— the English translation of the novel was published first, in the United
States in 1939 by Bobbs-Merrill,
but it would take a year before the sequel was published in the original German
language in Switzerland by his new publisher.[20]
Reception
Bambi was "hugely popular" after its publication,[21]
becoming a "book-of-the-month" selection and selling 650,000 copies
in the United States by 1942.[22] However, it was subsequently banned in Nazi
Germany in 1936 as "political allegory
on the treatment of Jews in Europe."[21] Many copies of the novel were burned, making original first
editions rare and difficult to find.[23][failed verification]
"The
reader is made to feel deeply and thrillingly the terror and anguish of the
hunted, the deceit and cruelty of the savage, the patience and devotion of the
mother to her young, the fury of rivals in love, the grace and loneliness of
the great princes of the forest. In word pictures that are sometimes
breath-taking the author draws the forest in all its moods--lashed into madness
by storms, or white and silent under snow, or whispering and singing to itself
at daybreak.
When
Felix Salten visited the United States as a member of a European delegation of
journalists in May–July 1930, he was greeted warmly because of Bambi
wherever the delegation went, as was testified by the Finnish member of the
delegation, Urho Toivola.[25] In his own travel book, Salten did not boast about this;
only when describing his visit to a “Negro college” of Atlanta, he mentions
passingly that the children praised his books.[26]
In
his foreword of the novel, John
Galsworthy called it a "delicious book -
delicious not only for children but for those who are no longer so
fortunate" and a "little masterpiece" that shows a
"delicacy of perception and essential truth". He notes that while
reading the galley proof
of the novel while crossing the English
Channel, he, his wife, and his nephew read
each page in turn over the course of three hours in "silent
absorption."[27] The New York Times reviewer John Chamberlain praised Salten's "tender,
lucid style" that "takes you out of yourself".[10] He felt that Salten captured the essence of each of the
creatures as they talked, catching the "rhythm of the different beings who
people his forest world" and showed particular "comprehension"
in detailing the various stages of Bambi's life.[10] He also considered the English translation
"admirably" done.[10] A reviewer for Catholic
World praised the approach of the
subject, noting that it was "marked by poetry and sympathy [with] charming
reminders of German folklore and fairy tale".[28] However, they disliked the "transference of certain
human ideals to the animal mind" and the vague references to religious allegory.[28] The Boston
Transcript called it a "sensitive
allegory of life".[29] The Saturday Review considered it "beautiful and graceful" piece that
showed a rare "individuality".[29] The Times
Literary Supplement stated that the novel is a
"tale of exceptional charm, though untrustworthy of some of the facts of
animal life."[29][30] Isabel
Ely Lord, reviewing the novel for the American Journal of
Nursing, called the novel a
"delightful animal story" and Salten a "poet" whose
"picture of the woods and its people is an unforgettable one."[31] In comparing Bambi to Salten's later work Perri—in which Bambi makes a brief cameo—Louise Long of the Dallas Morning News considered both to be stories that "quietly and
completely [captivate] the heart". Long felt the prose was "poised
and mobile and beautiful as poetry" and praises Salten for his ability to
give the animals seemingly human speech while not "[violating] their essential
natures."[24]
Vicky
Smith of Horn Book Magazine felt the novel was gory compared to the later Disney
adaptation and called it a "weeper". While criticizing it as one of
the most notable anti-hunting novels available, she concedes the novel is not
easily forgettable and praises the "linchpin scene" where Bambi's
mother dies, stating "the understated conclusion of that scene, 'Bambi
never saw his mother again,' masterfully evokes an uncomplicated emotional
response".[32] She questions Galsworthy's recommendation of the novel to sportsmen in the foreword, wondering "how many budding sportsmen
might have had conversion experiences in the face of Salten's unrelieved
harangue and how many might have instead become alienated."[32] In comparing the novel to the Disney film, Steve Chapple of
Sports Afield
felt that Salten viewed Bambi's forest as a "pretty scary place" and
the novel as a whole had a "lot of dark adult undertones."[33] Interpreting it as an allegory for Salten's own life,
Chapple felt Salten came across as "a little morbid, a bleeding heart of a
European intellectual."[33] The Wall Street Journal's James P. Sterba also considered it an "antifascist
allegory" and sarcastically notes that "you'll find it in the
children's section at the library, a perfect place for this 293-page volume,
packed as it is with blood-and-guts action, sexual conquest and betrayal"
and "a forest full of cutthroats and miscreants. I count at least six
murderers (including three child-killers) among Bambi's associates."[34]
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