Spanish academy starts YouTube campaign to ‘crowd-read’ classic Don Quixote
By ANIFriday, October 1, 2010
LONDON - In a bid to promote Spain’s most famous novel Don Quixote, the Royal Spanish Academy has invited people around the world to record short chunks of the classic tome and upload them to YouTube.
Despite its fame, few have read Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
And now, the academy, the official guardian of the Spanish language, has divided the work into more than 2,000 segments.
They will be read and recorded - in Spanish only - by volunteers visiting a special YouTube page.
According to the academy, the campaign was aimed at promoting both the Spanish language and the famous book, which carried the full title ‘The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha’.
“The Spanish language does not occupy the space that it deserves on the Internet,” the BBC quoted the secretary of the academy, Dario Villanueva, as saying.
“We want to denounce that and do something to correct it,” he added.
Written in 1605, the novel tells of the adventures of a retired gentleman from the la Mancha region who is obsessed with chivalrous ideas.
The original boasts 26 chapters and is nearly 1,000 pages long. (ANI)
