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.

In the book’s final chapter, “Messages from Within,” Serenella Iovino analyzes the work of the Italian writer Primo Levi, particularly the short story “Man’s Friend,” which imagines a genetic poetics produced by a tapeworm infestation. Iovino then uses the story to explore the emergent field of biosemiotics. The chapter traces a genealogy of biosemiotics in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Jakob von Uexküll, Denis Noble, and Wendy Wheeler (to whom the chapter is dedicated). Iovino also connects Levi’s writing to his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp – a dehumanizing experience that deprived him of his freedom as well as his ability to communicate. Framing the chapter within reflections on the novel coronavirus pandemic, Iovino posits semiotic freedom as a fundamental imperative of all life.

The Conclusion reflects on the implications of the study’s findings for future research, particularly in cultural theory. Victorian adaptive appearance is considered as a discourse that in certain ways prefigured the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll, and more recent theorisations of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. The study shows that contemporary concepts of non-human and cross-species semiosis are less new than they may seem. However, it also problematises post-humanist celebrations of the supposed collapsing of the human/non-human binary. Similarly, the study shows that biosemiotic thinking does not necessarily align with progressive politics, as is sometimes assumed. As a cultural trope, adaptive appearance could both undermine and reinforce essentialist views of identity. It is suggested that the study’s discussions of visibility, recognition and appearance signpost new ways of approaching the politics of the gaze and the ideological stakes of female visibility. Some hints are offered on how researchers might explore the afterlives of adaptive appearance in twentieth-century science and culture. The chapter also notes how adaptive appearance has featured in retrospective fictive depictions of Victorian society and culture. Finally, parallels are suggested between Victorian adaptive appearance and current representations of environmental crisis.

The Introduction outlines the historical context in which evolutionary theories of animal mimicry, concealment and display (grouped under the term ‘adaptive appearance’) emerged, and how they interacted with broader Victorian culture. It is argued that adaptive appearance constituted a shared discourse in which scientific arguments overlapped with more general ideas about appearance, perception and semiosis that can be traced in the period’s literature. Adaptive appearance was symbiotic with new models of communication that located meaning in receiver interpretations instead of sender intentions. In this way, it challenged the Cartesian binary between semiotic humans and mechanistic animals, suggesting that non-humans might be imagined as performers, deceivers and interpreters. This implication problematised the ideal of scientific objectivity, framing subjective perceptions and misperceptions as intrinsic to nature’s processes. Equally, adaptive appearance inspired reimaginings of human social interactions involving appearance and interpretation as biological processes instead of moral acts. It is suggested that, by materialising mind and meaning, adaptive appearance in some ways prefigured contemporary theories of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. However, such discourse was not necessarily politically progressive. Adaptive appearance was ideologically adaptable, triggering different connotations for different observers, at once divine presence and absence, progress and degeneration, creative individuality and mindless conformity.