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For me, reading in Portuguese is a bit like watching the world go by through an extremely dirty window I can make out the general shape of things moving into and out of the frame, their colours and their size, but the detail is lost People’s genders and ages remain uncertain, and events tend to come as a bit of a surprise, because everything building up to them has been concealed underneath a layer of grime   I took two years’ worth of language classes while I was a student, but I never spent any decent period of time in a Portuguese-speaking country, and since then Spanish has elbowed out much of what I learned There’s a wonderful scene in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station that often comes to mind as I try to wade my way through a short story or an essay written in Portuguese, in which the protagonist tries to flirt – in a language he has only recently started to learn – with a girl at a party:   She began to say something either about the moon, the effect of the moon on the water, or was using the full moon to excuse Miguel or the evening’s general drama, though the moon wasn’t full […] Then she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish   This is exactly how I feel when I read in Portuguese: as though I have to hold multiple possible versions of the narrative simultaneously in my mind, letting it morph from one nebulous shape into another in the hope that one of them will eventually swim into focus It can be frustrating, sure, but once I relax into it there is something enjoyable, as Lerner puts it, about ‘dwelling among possible referents’, letting them ‘interfere and separate like waves’ I carried out this exercise