Tyll

Kings in Winter
 
I
 
It was November. The wine supply was exhausted, and because the well in the garden was filthy, they drank nothing but milk. Since they could no longer afford candles, the whole court went to bed in the evening with the sun. The state of affairs was not good, yet there were still princes who would die for Liz. Recently, one of them had been here in The Hague, Christian von Braunschweig, and had promised her to have pour dieu et pour elle embroidered on his standard, and afterward, he had sworn fervently, he would win or die for her. He was an excited hero, so moved by himself that tears came to his eyes. Friedrich had patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, and she had given him her handkerchief, but then he had burst into tears once again, so overwhelmed was he by the thought of possessing a handkerchief of hers. She had given him a royal blessing, and, deeply stirred, he had gone on his way.
 
Naturally, he would not accomplish it, neither for God nor for her. This prince had few soldiers and no money, nor was he particularly clever. It would take men of a different caliber to defeat Wallenstein, someone like the Swedish king, say, who had recently come down on the Empire like a storm and had so far won all the battles he had fought. He was the one she should have married long ago, according to Papa s plans, but he hadn t wanted her.
 
It was almost twenty years ago that she had instead married her poor Friedrich. Twenty German years, a whirl of events and faces and noise and bad weather and even worse food and completely wretched theater.
 
She had missed good theater more than anything else, from the beginning, even more than palatable food. In German lands real theater was unknown; there, pitiful players roamed through the rain and screamed and hopped and farted and brawled. This was probably due to the cumbersome language. It was no language for theater, it was a brew of groans and

DANIEL KEHLMANN s works have won the Candide Prize, the Hölderlin Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2016 17. Measuring the World has been translated into more than forty languages.

ROSS BENJAMIN s previous translations include Friedrich Hölderlin s Hyperion, Joseph Roth s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann s You Should Have Left. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka s diaries.

**Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize**

Brilliant and unputdownable. Salman Rushdie

Profoundly enchanting. . . . A magnificent story. . . . A spellbinding memorial to the nameless souls lost in Europe s vicious past, whose whispers are best heard in fables. The New York Times Book Review

Kehlmann is a gifted and sensitive storyteller. . . . He is a playful realist, a rationalist drawn to magical games and tricky performances, a modern who likes to look backward. . . . Brilliant. The New Yorker
 
Prodigiously imaginative. . . . Brilliant, blackly sardonic. . . . In Mr. Kehlmann s unforgettable joker we have a picture of humankind in all of its madness and strutting pride. The Wall Street Journal

Kehlmann, like Tyll, is a trickster. . . . Entertaining us like a jester on a tightrope and reminding us of the danger of a fall.   Washington Post

A laugh-out-loud-then-weep-into-your-beer comic novel about a war. . . . Ambitious, clever, tricksy, self-reflective. . . . It s operatic in its gestures and heartbreaking in its absurdity. The Times (UK)

A rip-roaring yarn. . . . It plunges a modern reader into an astonishingly violent and dirty alternative reality. . . . But Tyll is a very funny novel, too. . . . There are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times. The Guardian