Bambi's Children
First English edition
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| Author | Felix Salten |
|---|---|
| Original title | Bambis Kinder: Eine Familie im Walde |
| Translator | Barthold Fles |
| Illustrator |
Hans Bertle (Swiss edition) Erna Pinner (U.S. edition) |
| Country | Switzerland |
| Language | German |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher |
Bobbs-Merrill (US) Albert Müller (Switzerland) |
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Publication date
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1940 |
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Published in English
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1939 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 315 |
| OCLC | 225457 |
| LC Class | PZ10.3.S176 Bap10 |
| Preceded by | Bambi, A Life in the Woods |
Bambi's Children: The Story of a Forest Family (German: Bambis Kinder: Eine Familie im Walde) is a novel written by Austrian author Felix Salten as a sequel to his successful work Bambi, A Life in the Woods.
The sequel to Bambi follows the lives of the twin children of Bambi and his cousin Faline as they grow from fawns through adulthood. Salten wrote the sequel while living in exile in Switzerland after being forced to flee Nazi-occupied Austria as he was of Jewish heritage. Originally written in German, the novel was first published in English in the United States in 1939 by Bobbs-Merrill. It was not published in German until the following year.Perri, a squirrel character from one of Salten's earlier novels, makes several appearances in the book.
The models for Geno and Gurri were Felix Salten’s own children, Paul who was careful and timid, and Anna Katharina, who was merry and optimistic. Salten also included himself as the responsible and humane hunter in the novel.
In German language, the content of Bambi’s Children is more violent, even gorier than that of Bambi, A Life in the Woods, but violent depictions of killings and mutilated animals have been toned down or removed from the English translation so that its language appears gentler than that of Bambi.
Although the title page of the American edition claims that the English translation is “complete and unabridged,” in reality it is somewhat abridged and greatly altered in tone and content; for instance, italicized wordplay has been added to the English edition. On the other hand, the 1977 Swedish translation, Bambis barn, is essentially abridged, without a mention of this in the book.
Felix Salten himself did not want to be identified merely a children’s author, and he opposed the changes his American publisher wanted to make in Bambi’s Children, for instance to the section which depicts the mating season of the deer. He wrote to his American publisher:
“At this time I beg you most urgently, quite apart from softenings, not to advertise my work as a children’s book or to launch it otherwise in such a way.”
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Wikipedia