Dutch · Intermediate
Read Een zwerver verliefd in Dutchwith every sentence explained
English title: A Wanderer in Love
Arthur van Schendel · 1904
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Een zwerver verliefd by Arthur van Schendel was first published in 1904. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 33,400 words.
A runaway friar who loves only the open road. A warlord, a girl from an enemy house. Medieval Italy, in lyrical prose.
As a boy, Tamalone sang in the church choir and wandered his town's streets, lost in dreams of knights, saints and faraway lands. Flogged for helping an old woman escape the watch, he runs away, joins a Franciscan friary, and flees again when the brothers are suspected of heresy. From then on he wanders south, a merry, story-telling friar with no home, happy with sun and clouds.
At thirty he dances into a hill town just captured by Rogier, a young captain fighting for the Emperor against the Pope. In the cool cathedral Rogier glimpses Mevena, youngest daughter of Lugina, his family's old enemy. Tamalone becomes their go-between — and the wanderer who wanted nothing but freedom begins to lose his own heart.
A Wanderer in Love (1904) was Arthur van Schendel's breakthrough: a dreamy, musical novella by one of the finest stylists in Dutch literature.
- Author
- Arthur van Schendel
- First published
- 1904
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 33,400 words
How it opens
Toen Tamalone een knaap was van dertien jaren, bleek en bescheiden, was hij het meest geliefde kind van zijn vader, die hem altoos bij zich verlangde, hem ’s morgens medenam naar het hof van den baljuw en hem zijn boek liet dragen. En thuis na het avondeten las hij hem voor, dicht bij hem gezeten. De jongen luisterde dan met oogen neêrgeslagen naar de geschiedenissen van de heiligen, van de koningen en de oorlogen en zat nog langen tijd daarna zwijgend voor zich te staren. Maar zelden sprak hij een woord.
Reading Een zwerver verliefd in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Dutch feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
