NYRB Classics: Damion Searls presents Felix Salten's "Bambi," with Paul Reitter & Fatima Naqvi

Translator Damion Searls joins us to present his new translation of Felix Salten's novel "Bambi," in conversation with Paul Reitter & Fatima Naqvi. This virtual event, brought to you in partnership with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): communitybooks...
About the book:
"Bambi" first came out in Vienna a hundred years ago, the work of Felix Salten, a Viennese litterateur, journalist, and man about town, and was an immediate success with readers. An English translation soon appeared with an introduction by the Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy and was widely and well reviewed. Later Walt Disney made his famous movie of the book, and as a consequence Salten’s intimate, delicate, poetic, and gripping tale of forest life, a book that captures both the calm and the disquiet of the animal world, has come to be thought of as a children’s book. "Bambi" is certainly a book that children can enjoy, but it is also a moving and lasting contribution to the literature of the natural world. In Damion Searls’s new translation the fawn Bambi and his mother, the groves and thickets of the forest, the open and dangerous space of the great field, the ever-present threat of the human-the whole intricate weave of life and death that Salten handles so deftly-all come alive for a new generation of readers. Paul Reitter’s afterword discusses the surprising political readings to which Salten’s fable of the woods was subjected.
About our guests:
Damion Searls is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. He was longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize with Jon Fosse, for "The Other Name: Septology I-II," and shortlisted in 2022 for the last book in the series; he is currently on the longlist twice for the National Book Award in translation. His own books include "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going" (stories), "The Inkblots" (a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach), and "The Philosophy of Translation" (forthcoming).
Paul Reitter teaches in the German department at the Ohio State University. He is the co-editor, along with Chad Wellmon, of "Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions" by Friedrich Nietzsche, which was published by NYRB Classics in 2015.
Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She has written books on victimhood in European culture after 1968; the films of Michael Haneke; the degradation of the landscape; and the interrelationship between space and Bildung in Thomas Bernhard. She is currently working on the hospital experience in fin-de-siècle Vienna.