From Reuters:

Drafts of “Madame Bovary,” Gustave Flaubert’s classic tale of adultery and thwarted dreams, are being shown online for the first time thanks to a mass effort to transcribe the originals.

Some 650 volunteers from all over the world, including teenagers, an oil worker and a cleaning lady, have transcribed thousands of often hardly legible hand-written manuscripts in a project overseen by a museum in Rouen in northwestern France. …

The decade-long project to prepare the writings for publication on the Internet cost 120,000 euros and was supported by the work of literature fans from 12 countries.

The result can be seen at www.bovary.fr and is meant to appeal to specialists as well as amateurs.

Supervert - the entity responsible for the subversive classics Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish and Necrophilia Variations - has put together a site devoted to that classic of Decadent poetry and French lit in general, Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du mal]. Every poem from all three editions in the original French is there, accompanied by two to five different English-language translations of each one. This cleanly designed site is a model of how to present a work of poetry in a foreign tongue.

fleursdumal.org

If you have up to three English words you’d like to have rendered in Sanskrit, Kiran Paranjape - an orthopedic surgeon in India - will do it for you for free, and very quickly. Go to his blog and scroll down a little until you see the form to email him for instructions.

He’ll also translate one to three words into other languages, including Bengali, Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew.

You might not even need to submit, since he’s already translated thousands of words, phrases, and names, which he posts. “Love” and “peace” are pretty popular. And there’s “sister,” “know thyself,” “no regrets,” “forgiveness,” “strength,” “honor,” “thank you,” “Be the change,”  etc. People have paid a little more for longer phrases like “Live and let live,” “Faith justifies neither violence nor ignorance,” and “Enveloped in rich mysterious flesh.”

An Anglican priest from Canada is retracing Kerouac and Cassady’s trip from the second part of On the Road, and he’s blogging it.

In 2007, reporters from the Boston Globe and USA Today also followed Kerouac’s fumes.

{Image from On the Road 2009 blog}