Read Ik en mijn speelman in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Ik en mijn speelman by Aart van der Leeuw was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and romance. It runs to about 51,300 words.

A bored young nobleman. A hunchbacked street musician. One song that changes everything.

Claude, vicomte de Lingendres, is twenty, rich, and tired of powdered wigs, card tables and kisses that cost nothing. Since the age of ten he has been promised to Mathilde d'Almonde, a marquis's daughter he has never laid eyes on and has always managed to avoid. Now his furious father commands: marry within three months — or else.

Then, one night, a hunchbacked minstrel named Valentijn sings a song in the dark so beautiful that hardened rakes weep. Claude cannot get it out of his heart. When his father's steward arrives to take him home to his wedding, he runs away instead — down the open road with Valentijn and his guitar, towards village inns and dances, a stray dog they christen Tiberius, and a charming girl called Madeleen.

Aart van der Leeuw's Me and My Minstrel (1927) is a light-hearted, poetic picaresque fairy tale, and his best-loved book.

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.