Emily Tian
Bambi by Felix Salten, trans. Damion Searls, New York Review of Books, 152 pp., $16.95
It’s August. We are driving a rental car along the Washington coast, down roads that lean close to the sea, then away. Lunch stop near a small marina. Thick clouds gather overhead. Only a few dinghies are out, leashed to the pier, on water the wind slivers into dashes.
Dad wants us to go to the mouth of the river. I don’t care to follow him; from where I stand the water looks gray, listless. Everyone’s interested in beginnings and endings, he says, half as a joke.
We begin in the brackish in-between. Before you and I got here, the world was already desperately in need of repair. Even on that trip I was let down that wilderness everywhere was bracketed by well-marked footpaths, the sound of my own sneakers on gravel, “wilderness” deliverable only in quotes.
As a kid I loved a famous story about a fawn in a false wilderness, and I’ve recently had a reason to return to it. Exactly a hundred years after Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten’s novel was first serialized in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, Bambi — from which the 1942 film is adapted — has been re-released, courtesy of NYRB Classics, with a new translation from the German by Damion Searls.
In the first half of the book, when Bambi is still young, the prose is verdant and revelatory, with Searls’ deft translation preserving the glancingly light sentences that make the novel still accessible for young readers. Through Bambi, we meet a butterfly who takes offense when he is mistaken for a flower and an exquisitely well-mannered hare whose mustachio sticks out stiffly in all directions.
The Disneyfied Bambi is a sad film, especially for the family movie genre, featuring not only the death of Bambi’s mother but also a truly infernal wildfire and a terrifying pack of hunting dogs.
The novel is often even more melancholy, most of all in its brutal confrontation with the irretrievable loss of youth. Adult Bambi, encountering two abandoned young deer in the forest calling after their mother, says admonishingly, “Your mother has no time for you now. Can’t you be alone?” — repeating what his elusive father, the Old Prince, had once told him. He walks on, disappearing into the forest.
When I was younger my father used to go hunting, which is surprising, because he is a very mild and quiet middle-aged Chinese man. And by hunting I mean he would enter an annual Maryland lottery to obtain a few open slots during game season, leave the house before morning would break, sit in his camos in a tree stand, and wait. Despite the very cold, very uncomfortable position he routinely put himself in, through all those years he never once saw — or shot — a thing. (While deer were everywhere else! In the suburbs! Roadside! In our own backyard!). My mother and I found this very funny.
Once, though, one of his friends dragged a deer to our garage. Blood pooled on the blue tarp they had put down in order to field dress it and prepare the venison. I was glad that my dad never hunted anything himself.
Hunting, in Salten’s novel, is not a punctuated event but a force that warps the entire social consciousness of the animal community. The bleakest scene in the book is when a hunter shoots Bambi’s childhood companion Gobo, who has foolishly grown to trust humans after one treats his wound. “He didn’t recognize me…” Gobo says, his voice breaking off, a tragedy of non-recognition that recalls Euripides’ The Bacchae, when Dionysus-crazed Agave rips her son into shreds. Unlike its phantasmic off-screen presence in the movie, humankind is rendered here unflinchingly. The hunter is “strangely upright, strangely narrow, and it has a pale face, utterly naked around the nose and the eyes…. It has a monstrous, disturbing, paralyzing violence in it, and is almost unbearably painful to look at.” Reduced to these perverse glimpses and the speculative stories the animals tell to one another, humans are completely estranged from the reader’s sympathy.
As Bambi comes of age, the rhythm of forest life becomes excruciating, even in the absence of human intervention. Animals who commune together in the summer kill one another during wintertime. In Salten’s novel, Friend Owl does not explain twitterpation to wide-eyed Flower, Thumper, and Bambi while they each fall head over heels in love with their springtime mates. Instead, to prove himself to Faline, Bambi goes wild fighting two other male deer, snapping one of their antlers and thrashing them mercilessly. As a brooding and serious grown-up later in the novel, he abandons Faline without explanation. Such is love in Salten’s forest.
Bambi is part of a long, long literary tradition of using animals as allegory, and it isn’t hard to draw lines between the vulnerability of forest animals and the imperilment of European Jews, a subject Salten took seriously throughout his life. He was Jewish himself, the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, and had changed his name as a teenager in Austria to conceal his identity. In 1936, Hitler banned Salten’s books in Germany. Two years later, as war broke out, he and his wife fled to Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1945.
As with other works of animal literature, Bambi’s nonhuman animals can be convenient representational vehicles for displaced and dispossessed people. And yet the novel is even more striking if we allow ourselves to imagine, with Salten, the dizzying crossweave of a multispecies world. Consider Salten’s ode to two autumn leaves, stragglers on an oak tree, who imagine what will happen when they fall down below: “Then the first leaf said to the second, fondly: ‘Don’t get so upset, you’re trembling.’ ‘Oh, never mind that,’ the second replied. ‘I tremble all the time now. One doesn’t feel so firmly attached to one’s place anymore.’”
The ending of Salten’s novel permits us to imagine that the natural cycle of life and death in the forest manages to continue interminably into the future. The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable that narrative convention — particularly in contemporary works of literary fiction — has by and large failed to adapt to the demands of the climate crisis. Given the sobering reality of the environmental crisis today, Bambi’s soft landing could be dismissed as naive. But its empathy toward the world outside of individual human morality and consciousness, which is precisely that of a child, gives the novel its particular and precise nowness.
William Stafford has a great, frequently anthologized poem, about a driver who stops by a deer carcass to roll it off the mountain road before realizing that her belly is still warm with her unborn fawn inside. As he stands there deciding what to do:
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
In Bambi, too, we catch the wilderness listening to us.