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Translating Cuttlefish: Underwater Lifewritings
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 32, Number 1, Winter 2009
- pp. 114-127
- 10.1353/bio.0.0078
- Article
- Additional Information
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In underwater life-writing, poetry, marine biology, and memoir meet like ocean currents. Both biography—the subject is the sea—and autobiography—the subject is the writer—the genre's practitioners explore metaphor and metamorphosis in sea life and in themselves. In attempting to "translate" mysterious creatures like cuttlefish, writers draw on poetry and science to create rich and strange discourses that also "translate" humans into and out of an element of depth.