"[...] a salir un rato después de ella como un literal pinchaúvas"¹.

"[...] leaving it some time later as a literal pinchaúvas or "puncturer of grapes", which is a way of saying ne'er do-well or good-for-nothing in Spanish [...]"².

Peirce sets up the question of equivalence on the basis of logical arguments, specifying that he refers to an "intellectual" equivalence. Transferred into the context of a translation, intellectual equivalence has nothing to do with textual equivalence, because we know that in many texts the form of the content takes precedence over the substance. These arguments of Peirce's can tell us something about equivalence provided that we stay in the narrow framework of the purely denotative texts, the so-called "closed texts".
  Observing Peirce's reasoning, we cannot help but notice the affinity of the "endless" logic concatenation of equivalences to the "endless" concatenation of the signification process, in which the interpretant in the previous triad becomes sign in the next one:

Equivalence, a theoretic application, needs to be distinguished from non-equivalence, a practical application. Notice that the primary meaning is not attributable to the intrinsic worth of the proposition, but only, uniquely, to the chronotopical situation in which I, reader of the text, translator of the text, find myself. It is a sort of equivalence in the form of concatenation of interpretants; it is a contiguous position in the chain of interpretants, which works only here and now and for me, within me. More than equivalence, it is a coincidence, a matching that, however, I cannot justify, I have no need to explain, because it is a mental inner phenomenon of mine. It is mental contiguity that I can use for communication outside of myself only if I can hope that it also works for a significant number of individuals beside me that compose the population from which I extract my contingent notion of "model reader" for the communication act I am performing.

Peirce's choosing the example of a scientific experiment to speak of equivalence is significant because it openly refers to the scientific context in which such a concept can be understood.

Peirce's imaginary interviewer in this passage tries to get him to say something concrete, to unbalance him on the plane of pragmatic applicability of such a reasoning, of the objectivity of the concatenation. But Peirce wants just to insert some distance from such a practical interpretation:

Peirce, therefore, thinks equivalence possible only in an intellectual sense and only when referring to a given contingent chronotope.
  Such a term - chronotope - was not yet created, and I attribute it to him for comfortable exposition's sake within the context of this course in which many a time it was explained. Even if, for truth's sake, Peirce uses another term, a not easily translatable one, indicating the presence "there and now" of some object:

Such reasoning has the purpose, as far as we are concerned, to undermine the basis of any attempt to create a theory of equivalence having value for a translator and her readers. The perspective opened on the possible existence of concatenations of equivalents on the plane of subjective interpretants is, on the contrary, very suggestive and potentially dense with useful consequences in the debate on the possibility of creating a shareable theory of the translation process.
  In accepting Peirce's argumentation, one suspects that those who insist too much on the notion of equivalence - not only in translation, but in other fields as well - have an imperfect view of the limitations of one's Self as compared to the Other. That there is, in other words, too optimistic a presumption that the mental mechanisms and concatenations working for oneself should necessarily follow the same path for the rest of the world. If that were the reality, translating - more generally, understanding each other - would be definitely easier.

Bibliographical references

MARÍAS J. Negra espalda del tiempo, Punto de lectura, 2000 (original edition 1998), ISBN 84-663-0007-7.

MARÍAS J. Dark Back of Time, New York, New Directions, 2001 (translated by Esther Allen), ISBN 0-8112-1466-4.

PEIRCE C. S. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, v. 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, v. 7-8 edited by Arthur W. Burks, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Harvard University Press, 1931-1935, 1958.