Salten’s view of the forest also captures nature’s horrifying events. It creates a reverence, emotional and physical, for the sublime-the astonishment of encountering something beautiful up close, in sharp definition, for the first time. Now its hot blinding power held absolute sway over him as he stood in a blessed heat that shut his eyes and opened his heart.” The sense of wonder is galvanizing. Having spent much time walking dark paths, obscured by tree-enshrined cloisters, the open expanse overwhelms the young fawn with joy: “Back in the forest, the sun had appeared only as occasional sunbeams or delicate clots of golden light playing through the branches. Salten casts milestone moments in awe-inducing light, as in Bambi’s first visit to the meadow with his mother. Days filled with foraging, rest, and communication evoke the full lives these nonhumans lead. Searls’ poetic translation immerses the reader in forest life, putting us ground level with the animals, for better and worse.
For a slim book, Bambi carries great allegorical heft-political, ecological, and existential-and is also a moving meditation on attention and solitude. This fall, a reissue from New York Review Books Classics-translated by Damion Searls, with an afterword by Mark Reitter-offers readers another look at this enduring coming-of-age story. A new translation by Jack Zipes emerged from Princeton University Press earlier in the year. This year marks one hundred years since a Viennese newspaper first serialized Felix Salten’s novel Bambi.
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