In Art and Literature
The first movement of French pianist Erik Satie's Embryons desséchés is titled "D'Holothournie". It is said to emulate the "purring" of the Holothourian.
Sea cucumbers have inspired thousands of haiku in Japan, where they are called namako (海鼠), written with characters that can be translated "sea mice" (an example of gikun). In English translations of these haiku, they are usually called "sea slugs". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English term "sea slug" was originally applied to holothurians during the 18th century. The term is now applied to several groups of sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks that have no shell or only a very reduced shell, including the nudibranchs. Almost 1,000 Japanese holothurian haiku translated into English appear in the book Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! by Robin D. Gill.
Nobel laureate poet Wisława Szymborska wrote a poem which mentions holothurians, titled "Autotomy".
Read more about this topic: Sea Cucumber
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or literature:
“The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)