Variorum
Editions that preserve the variants — and the reasoning that produced them.
A variorum is a scholarly edition that holds the contested readings of a text together with the editorial arguments that produced them. The form has existed since the seventeenth century — Bentley's Horace, the Furness Shakespeares, R. W. Franklin's Dickinson — and has always rested on a quiet collective of scholars weighing manuscript witnesses, prior editions, letters, and arguments. This platform makes that collective explicit.
Each work below presses a different kind of editorial crux. Open one to see the apparatus, propose your own crux at any contested word, or endorse a reading with reasoning.
Sappho 31 (φαίνεταί μοι)
The Greek text reaches us only through a 1st-century rhetorician's quotation, transmitted by a 10th-century Byzantine scribe, with two loci desperati where the manuscript transmission fails. Voigt's 1971 critical edition serves as primary, with Catullus's Latin imitation alongside and five English translators — Wharton, Barnard, Carson, Poochigian, Rayor — pressing on the chromatic vs. affective sense of chloros, the reconstruction of the corrupt fourth stanza, and the fragmentary ending.
OpenSonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true mindes)
The 1609 Quarto, misnumbered "119" in print, served as the textual ground for four centuries of editorial intervention. Benson's 1640 octavo, Malone's 1790 critical edition, Booth's 1977 commentary, and Vendler's 1997 reading each made different choices at the same cruxes — the meaning of impediments, the negative concord of "if this be error … no man ever loved," the punctuation of the famous couplet. The variorum traces the print history from Q1609 forward.
OpenFr124 (Safe in their Alabaster Chambers)
Dickinson sent the poem out, revised it after Sue's letter of objection, and produced at least four distinct second-stanza variants — Light laughs, Grand go, Springs — shake the Sills, Springs — shake the seals — none of which she ever published. The variorum holds the Fascicle 6 holograph at center and arrays the variants and their archival traces (Sue's letter, the Higginson correspondence, the anonymous Republican printing) as orbital witnesses.
OpenThe First Duino Elegy (Erste Elegie)
The 1923 Insel-Verlag first edition serves as the textual ground; the cruxes are the choices five English translators have made in carrying Rilke's German into another language. Leishman & Spender (1939), Mitchell (1982), Gass (1999), Snow (2000), and Crucefix (2006) disagree, sometimes sharply, about Engel Ordnungen, noch grade ertragen, the gedeutete Welt, and what to do with Rilke's terminal "Bleiben ist nirgends."
OpenThe platform is open-source. To seed a new work, read the schema — five primary entities, one mode-specific anchor on a crux, one optional manuscript image. Copy works/_template.json, fill it in, validate with python3 validate.py works/<id>.json, and open a pull request against the repository. The engine is content-agnostic; everything textual lives in the JSON.
Works in the public domain are the easiest to seed cleanly. Modern translations and critical editions are workable but require careful attention to quotation length under fair use.