Most readings of the meaning skepticism Kripke ascribes to Wittgenstein understand it as metaphysical. The threat to meaning is supposed to follow immediately from the impossibility of citing facts in which meaning consists. I offer an alternative, epistemological, reading that is closer to Wittgenstein. What threatens meaning is the worry that, when I use an expression on any given occasion, I cannot know that my use conforms to previous uses of the expression; instead, in Wittgenstein’s terms, I go on “blindly,” without the understanding which is necessary for meaningful use. This reading makes for a stronger skeptical argument, in that it blocks the non-reductionist response of taking meaning facts to be primitive. But the argument, on this reading, can still be answered: not by citing meaning facts but by showing that I can know how to go on with an expression without needing to appeal to what the expression means.

The underlying proposition, that translation is a model or homologue of ecological action, involves the rejection of notions of preservation and conservation. For their own continuing health, ecosystems need to be conducted in the same spirit as a translational act. The chapter then turns to Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt and its apprpriateness to translational thinking; then to its legacy in biosemiotics. How, then, does translational language achieve that perlocutionary ability to re-immerse us in the environment? Through the cultivation of idiolect and alternity (Steiner), and of situatedness and presentness of the voice, particularly in articulation, paralanguage and rhythm, which envelope the verbal with the non-verbal and allow the human to slide towards the non-human. Equally language must be coaxed in the direction of the indexical, iconic and onomatopoeic, more flexibly understood; and language must be translated into forms and shapes unfamiliar to itself so that it can explore other models of psycho-perception. Arguments in the chapter are exemplified in translations of Hugo, Saint-John Perse, Heredia, Baudelaire and Hopkins.

The chapter finds in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ a radical problematization of idiolect, one that creates a specific form of unstable narrative practice. It finds within these problematics a demand for what will be called the Loyolan Position: a mental stance towards the crises both Loyola and Joyce mobilize. The chapter is marked by a fresh, sustained close reading of one of the most well-read and well-analysed stories in English.