Read Pieter Bruegel in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Pieter Bruegel by Felix Timmermans was first published in 1928. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 89,600 words.

Born in a village inn under a stork's nest. Drawing everything he sees. Destined to paint the world as no one had before.

In a Brabant village on the river Dommel, a widow gives birth to a son in her inn, the Promised Land. His father, a tall, silent farmer who died a month earlier, wanted the boy to become a sailor. But little Pieter only wants to look — at windmills and snow, at drinkers and dancers at the fair, at the pigs, the priest and the dragons the wind kneads out of the clouds — and to draw it all, tongue between his teeth.

Felix Timmermans follows him from the village to Antwerp and the workshop of Master Coecke, across the Alps to Italy, and back to the crowded, merry, hard Flanders of his great paintings.

Published in English as Droll Peter, this warm, earthy, poetic novel of the painter's life (1928) is one of Timmermans' most celebrated books and was translated into many languages.

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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Dutch book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.