Bambi was Jewish!
Feb. 16th, 2022 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkI read an article the other day about a bold new translation of Bambi (originally written in German, 1922). Apparently the translator delved into the life story of Bambi's author, Felix Salten, and discovered a lot of "dystopic and sobering" subtext about growing up Jewish in a profoundly anti-Semitic society.
Intrigued, I downloaded the original translation from Project Gutenberg and read it on my Kindle. It is a trifle nihilistic, but I'm not sure it's quite as "dark" as people often claim. Not that much darker than the movie, anyway, which is disturbing enough in its Disneyfied version to have traumatized several generations of children. The hunters (in both versions) are mysterious, terrifying, and ultimately unstoppable. It hadn't occurred to me that they might be metaphorically proto-Nazis, but I guess I can buy that. Perhaps all the deer hunters that have been so infuriated by the movie over the years would relax a little if they realized it wasn't literally about hunting.
Intrigued, I downloaded the original translation from Project Gutenberg and read it on my Kindle. It is a trifle nihilistic, but I'm not sure it's quite as "dark" as people often claim. Not that much darker than the movie, anyway, which is disturbing enough in its Disneyfied version to have traumatized several generations of children. The hunters (in both versions) are mysterious, terrifying, and ultimately unstoppable. It hadn't occurred to me that they might be metaphorically proto-Nazis, but I guess I can buy that. Perhaps all the deer hunters that have been so infuriated by the movie over the years would relax a little if they realized it wasn't literally about hunting.
