A-CULTURATED’S JUNE 2026 WRITING PROMPT

The Untranslatable Word That Keeps Portugal in the World Cup

The art of ‘desenrascar’, in other words, unscrewing yourself

Photo by My Profit Tutor on Unsplash

The most dangerous thing that can happen to the Portuguese football team is to score an early goal.

Last Wednesday, Portugal played Congo in the World Cup 2026. We scored within the first ten minutes of the match, and then, as the overly optimistic and confident tend to do, we relaxed. It was as clear as the imminent water break the players were notably counting down the minutes to. A pass to the left here, a pass to the right there, and an attempt at nothing but killing the time until the whistle.

The confidence lasted us up to the moment that Congo scored, just as the halftime whistle was about to blow.

Then, when the second half of the game rolled in, our tactic changed. We were officially in ‘desenrascar’ mode, which is, more or less, our modus operandi. We’ll get to what the word means in just a moment…

A national sports team tells you more about a country than the country would like to admit. We Portuguese are not famous for our discipline. We leave things for the last minute and trust that the pressure will arrive on time to save us. Watch us play and there it is on the grass, ninety minutes of it in fact!

If you contrast our game to that of a team like Germany, you will find theirs to be more consistent, overall efficient, and diligent, like a machinery of a team that decided the result during the week, and has no time for shenanigans. (I wrote more about this here, if you want the longer version.)

So here we were, another match, another confirmation of what all of us watching already knew…isto só vai lá a desenrascar até à última! (this will only get there if we desenrascar until the last moment!)

Maybe you have already taken educated guesses as to what this word means, or maybe you Googled it. I Googled it myself, to try to translate it into English, and what I got back was: “to get out of trouble.”

Eh. Yes, but also, not really.

On Reddit, someone offered “to pull it off,” which is closer, in a way…

The dictionaries gave slightly more accurate definitions. According to Infopédia, desenrascar means, quite literally, to free, unscrew or untangle something caught or knotted.

Figuratively — this is where things get more interesting — it’s used in the sense of ‘to find a way out of an enrascada’, a jam or predicament, and, by extension, to solve a problem resourcefully, with creativity and whatever happens to be lying around.

Depending on the context, it can mean to manage, to figure something out, to get by, to sort something out, to improvise or to get oneself out of a jam or pickle.

Here are some examples of how you would use it in a sentence:

• “Deixa estar, eu desenrasco-me.” → “Leave it, I’ll figure it out.”
• “Ele desenrascou-se à grande e à francesa!” → “He sorted the situation out (in the big and in the French way)!” (another commonly used Portuguese idiom.)
• “Os portugueses sabem desenrascar-se.” → “Portuguese people know how to make do and find a way.”

The reflexive form, desenrasco-me, means, ‘I’ll figure it out on my own’, or lends towards a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of survival instinct. The adjective, desenrascando/a, is what we proudly sport as an accurate character description of our people. Maybe this is just a jolly way of us excusing ourselves for our poor time-management skills.

So yes, you get the picture I’m painting here now. Yet still, these definitions miss the essence, because what makes the word isn’t its direct verbal translation. And I suppose that’s what makes these “untranslatable” words so untranslatable. The word itself may be closely or at least semantically translatable; in this case, the verb is portable and can be repackaged into any given culture. We all improvise at some point or another. But the culture, energy, and history welded to the verb is not so transferable, and thus often gets lost in that translation.

To pull something off or improvise your way out of a shitty situation in the Portuguese way isn’t the same as the Norwegian way of doing it. We can translate the same sentence into different languages and yet produce entirely different acts.

Same idea, but different flavor.

In fact, the spin-off word we use to convey the same sentiment is “desenmerdar” meaning, quite literally, to un-shit yourself.

The Portuguese are notorious for their self-deprecating humor. We like to lament ourselves, and complain about our government, the economy, football, and even the weather, which is hilarious considering we have quite an optimal European climate. Still, some days it’s simply too cold, too rainy, too hot. We are a difficult bunch to please.

Finding ourselves in the “shitter” is therefore a reflection of our often shitty attitude, which, mind you, we port with a certain level of lightness. Yes, everything is terrible, so let’s just have a long lunch by the beach and enjoy life.

To help to translate this word even further, I would like to expose another general trait of ours. We are not the most organized, plan-ahead, punctual bunch. We are very stereotypically Southern European in that sense. We are laid back, and so, not very good at bothering ourselves too much with incidentals, being prepared, long-term thinking and the likes. We are more like jazz. We improvise when shit hits the fan, and enjoy the slow sinking of the Titanic until then.

I am exaggerating but I am also hitting the mark.

So given this laissez-faire nature — here’s a French word that is also untranslatable in its own right, meaning “let it be” or “leave it alone” — , it is clear that this whole “desenrascar” thing is really built into our way of living. Our attitude towards predicaments and problems that arise.

We just make it up. We improvise. And if we make it through, we are heros, and we laugh about it with our friends.

Back in 2009, the Portuguese newspaper Expresso published an article titled: “Resolve-se primeiro, pergunta-se depois e nunca se copia: apenas se ‘safa’” — solve it first, ask questions later, and never copy anyone; you just get away with it.

The planetary patron saint of the art of deserascar, the piece notes, is MacGyver — the man who escapes with whatever is on hand, “even if that’s strictly his own fingers.”

Surely, every culture has its own version of MacGyver, at least symbolically. Portugal’s version raised it to Olympic levels, and we wear it with pride.

The desenrascado, (they who improvise) José Alves Mendes observes, “is the one who solves a problem knowing little or nothing about the matter at hand, and without ever insulting the experts.”

That last part is essential to grasp this concept. Asking for help would be the efficient move, yet we are constitutionally incapable of it. “If we believed here that asking does no harm,” he writes, “we’d never show the qualities of a desenrascado.” So we don’t ask.

We brag about the way we solve things em cima do joelho (on top of the knee), which is a rather unbalanced and uncomfortable way of going about things, which is precisely why a Portuguese will choose it.

We also hand out medals for things we pulled off with no resources and in a ridiculously short time.

We won’t read the manual, or get out of our way to ask somebody who knows what they’re doing for help. We’ll just fidget with the thing until the piece fits, the logic is improvised, or the part is forced into place with a brisk shove, and the coisa (thing) gets solved.

Then, satisfied with our temporary (and geniously self-discovered) solution, we will exclaim the word “pronto!” (done or ready).

The fact that this masterful solution may dissolve ten minutes later is absolutely irrelevant and of no interest to the desenrascado; you’re crowned a hero the moment the problem is eradicated, no matter how briefly.

“Nada é eterno, nem mesmo um problema resolvido”, as Mendes puts it. Nothing is eternal, not even a solved problem.

Of course, the negative side of this innocent and clownish attribute is that it breeds a quiet contempt for people who actually know things, like the specialists we’d rather not call. Who needs them?! We also find it amusing to mistake safar-se (getting away with it) for common sense. Like someone who wasted their time learning things is an idiot when here I am, and I “figured it out” in five seconds. Smart-alecs or “chico-espertos” are the cornerstone of our cultura desenrasca. The ones who invest only if it is in the short term, with instant results, and who get farther faster than you, with no means to get there.

I think Mendes sums it up best when he says: “Na verdade, não resistimos a complicar na crença de que simplificamos.” (We can’t resist complicating something in the firm belief that we’re simplifying it.)

Perhaps these so-called “untranslatable” words are like idiosyncrasies of a group of people, passed down for eons, making them so invisibly obvious to the people within the group, and visibly less obvious to those on the outside.

Desenrascar is obvious to us in the way your own accent is obvious to you, which is to say, not at all, until a foreigner points at it.

We blame destiny when it suits us and credit our own cleverness when that suits us better. We shrug both cases off in the same way and use them to justify or celebrate ourselves, depending on what’s more convenient.

So when the final ten minutes of Wednesday’s match arrived, and even Cristiano Ronaldo — the most disciplined man we’ve ever produced, an argument against everything I’ve just told you — had to drop back and scramble and desenrascar like the rest of us, I didn’t despair.

None of us watching did. We’re used to it. It’s part of the reason we get excited to watch the match in the first place. To suffer through the improv. Because we all know that if we make it through, we’ll be heroes, and we’ll brag about it to all our friends.

Pronto.

This story was inspired by A-Culturated’s monthly writing prompt, Translating the Untranslatable. **Click here* to explore the prompt and share a piece of your own!*

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