The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten Francesca Arnavas (bio) The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest. By Felix Salten, translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Alenka Sottler, Princeton University Press, 2022, 161 pp. But of all his teachings the most important one was you must learn to live alone, if you want to protect yourself, if you want to grasp the meaning of existence, if you want to attain wisdom. You had to learn to live alone! (145) The main message that emerges from Felix Salten's Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, in Jack Zipes's new translation, is not what we would expect it to be: for most of us the name Bambi evokes the 1942 Disney movie, where the [End Page 113] depiction of the life of the big-eyed reddish deer comes with a happy ending in which Bambi is together with Faline and father of two beautiful baby deer. In the explanatory and illuminating introduction to his new translation, Zipes points out that the previous English translation, by Whittaker Chambers, is "filled with all sorts of errors and fails to capture Salten's unusual Viennese style of writing and anthropomorphism" (xviii). Disney's sugar-coated interpretation of Bambi came from Chambers's translation. Of course, Disney is known to have twisted and dulcified many literary texts that were originally extremely complex (such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865; J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, 1911; Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," 1837), but the mistakes, the "gentle language" (Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2022), and the loss of "the transcendental dimension that the original novel contains" (Strümper-Krobb, Austrian Studies, vol. 23, 2015) in Chambers's translation could have had an impact on how Disney retold the story. Sabine Strümper-Krobb emphasizes how many of the terms referring to the human world and applied to the animal kingdom that Salten used to create a stronger connection between humans and animals are changed by Chambers with more zoological, naturalistic words, reducing in this way the anthropomorphizing process of the original text. Similarly, words pertaining to the semantic field of metaphysical and religious experiences are toned down by Chambers, again opting for a more zoologically realistic depiction. Zipes's new translation not only is able to give us back the whole rich, multilayered complexity of Salten's story, a story that can be read as "a German Bildungsroman, or novel of education; an existentialist autobiography, and a defense of animal rights" (xxii), but his beautiful introduction, "Born to Be Killed," traces an extremely relevant parallelism between the vicissitudes represented in Bambi and Salten's own life tribulations and contradictions. Salten was an Austro-Hungarian Jew, who had to struggle against anti-Semitism, poverty, and exclusion, learning to survive relying just on his own forces and gaining, thanks to his literary talent and his social efforts, the support of the Viennese aristocracy (which later guaranteed his chance to escape from the Nazi persecutions). In a similar way, Bambi's story, even if it starts with sunny meadows, fluttering butterflies, and innocence (elements Disney has kept and expanded), soon turns into a narrative "full of horrors, blood, and suffering" (67). The life in the forest is a life of constant danger, "terrible hardship, spread bitterness and brutality" (70). Things change rapidly for Bambi, as he starts growing up, and there is "no longer restraint, peace, or mercy in the forest" (70). As it happened to Salten, the only way of life Bambi can adopt in order to survive is learning to live on his own, counting only on himself, and on the help and advice of the old prince. [End Page 114] Salten's views on animals were controversial: he was a strong supporter of animals' rights and wrote about their "unconditional decency" and "never sentimental innocence," and yet he was a hunter (xxvi). While reading Bambi, we can distinctively feel the unfairness of being hunted, the continuous sense of precariousness of the animals' life, and the mercilessness of the...
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".