Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Since his retirement from the University of Minnesota, the ever-productive Jack Zipes has focused much of his energies to putting back into print significant fairy tale collections and children's books in well-designed and affordable editions. He is the editor of both the Oddly Modern Fairy series published by Princeton University Press, that reprints literary fairy tales published from the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the Little Mole and Honey Bear series of historical children's books with progressive social and political messages distributed by University of Minnesota Press and Wayne State University Press.

Felix Salten's Bambi is the better-known of the two Zipes's edited books in this review. At least the character of Bambi is better-known than Brandt's illustrations. However, Zipes points [End Page 431] out in his introduction to his new translation of the novel that Salten has "gradually become detached, if not erased from Bambi" (xx) as a result of the popularity of Walt Disney's animated film version released in 1942. It will come as no surprise that Zipes considers Disney's film an overly sentimental version that does a disservice to Salten's Bambi. Zipes has been consistently critical of Disney film adaptations of fairy tales in his previous studies such as Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994) and Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (1997). In the excellent introduction, Zipes provides a useful historical context for understanding Bambi and Salten's intentions in writing the book.

In addition to dismissing Disney's film adaptation, Zipes finds fault with the standard English translation of Bambi that was published in 1928 by Whittaker Chambers. The translator was later revealed to be a communist spy who accused Alger Hiss of also being a communist spy during the famous 1948 House Committee on Un-American Activities Hearing. Chambers's limited understanding of Austrian German resulted in a translation that fails to capture Salten's Viennese style of writing and the political allegory of the anthropomorphism. Yet, when comparing Zipes's translation to that done by Chambers, the language choices seem rather modest. While Zipes believes that Chambers's translation does not reflect the writer's personal dilemma of being an assimilated Jew in Vienna who struggled to be accepted as an Austrian man of letters, it is Zipes's introduction, rather than his translation, that provides the social and political context for understanding the story. Both Chambers and Zipes effectively capture the philosophical nature of the text. Bambi was enormously popular when first published in English with illustrations by Kurt Weise, but it is no more a children's book than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince (1943). The short chapter featuring the two last leaves contemplating what will happen once they fall from the tree as winter approaches is a profoundly moving episode. It is a much more moving episode than the death of Bambi's mother, which is sparsely described in the novel—"Bambi never saw his mother again" (82). Her death occurs off-screen in the Disney film, despite viewers' vivid memory of it.

While Salten was one of the best journalists in Vienna, he consistently faced rising antisemitism and was never fully accepted as a member of the Young Vienna circle of writers and intellectuals. Although Bambi and Salten's other books had been banned by the Nazis in 1935, he continued to live in Vienna and supported the Austrian right-wing government until his departure to Switzerland. The success of Bambi enabled Salten to escape Vienna for neutral Switzerland after Austria had been annexed by Hitler in 1939.

Perhaps most surprising and disturbing to readers and viewers of Bambi is that Salten was an avid hunter...