Duo Duo or Duoduo (, born 1951) is the pen name of contemporary Chinese

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

, Li Shizheng (栗世征), a prominent exponent of the Chinese Misty Poets (朦胧诗). Duo Duo was awarded the 2010

Neustadt International Prize for Literature The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is a biennial award for literature sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international literary publication, ''World Literature Today''. It is considered one of the more prestigious int ...

Biography

Duo Duo was born in

Beijing Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. As a youth in the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a Social movement, sociopolitical movement in the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his de ...

, he was sent down to the countryside in Baiyangdian (白洋淀), where he began reading and writing poetry. Several of his schoolmates would also become famous as members of the underground poetry movement described as "Misty" by the authorities: Bei Dao, Gu Cheng and Mang Ke. Duo Duo's early poems are short and elliptical, in which some see barbed political references. In his early poems, there are numerous intertextual links to Western poets such as

Charles Baudelaire Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhythm and rhyme, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics ...

Marina Tsvetaeva Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva ( rus, Марина Ивановна Цветаева, p=mɐˈrʲinə ɪˈvanəvnə tsvʲɪˈta(j)ɪvə, links=yes; 31 August 1941) was a Russian poet. Her work is some of the most well-known in twentieth-century Russ ...

and

Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for '' The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960), '' Ariel'' (1965), a ...

. His style underwent a shift in the mid-1980s to longer, more philosophical poetry. In contrast to the clipped, image-based style of Bei Dao, Duo Duo tended to use longer, more flowing lines, and paid more attention to sound and rhetoric. Some of his poems border on the essayistic, such as the 1984 ''Lessons'' also translated as ''Instruction'' (诲教), which spoke for China's "lost generation" as much as Bei Dao's ''Answer''. In 1989, Duo Duo having been witness to the

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 The Tiananmen Square protests, known within China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between t ...

, as fortune had it was booked on a plane on 4 June to

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

where he was due to give a poetry reading at the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

. He went on to live for many years in the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands. His poetic language went through another shift, taking up the themes of exile and rootlessness. In the absence of a Chinese-speaking community, Duo Duo began to use the

Chinese language Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39& ...

more self-consciously. Sometimes his poems border on the impenetrable yet are highly effective, such as the poem ''Watching the Sea'' (看海). In 2004, Duo Duo returned to China and began to teach at

Hainan University Hainan University (HainanU or HNU) is a provincial public university in Haikou, Hainan, China. It is affiliated with the Province of Hainan, and co-funded by the Hainan Provincial People's Government, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry o ...

Awards

In 2009, a jury representing nine countries selected Duo Duo as the 2010 winner of the $50,000

, making him the award's 21st laureate and the first Chinese author to win the prize. He is also associated with many respected Chinese literary festivals and awards, such as Yinchuan Poetry Prize and others.

Translations

The author and academic Gregory B. Lee has translated many of Duo Duo's poems into English, and has written about the poet's work, most recently in his book ''China's Lost Decade''. Jin Zhong 金重( Jone Guo, USA) was also one of the earliest translators of Duo Duo's poetry. A good selection of the translations was published by American Poetry Review in 1993, which became a milestone for Chinese poetry published in this magazine.

References

External links

Gregory B. Lee's homepage
- translated Duo Duo's poems {{DEFAULTSORT:Duo, Duo 1951 births Living people 21st-century Chinese male writers Poets from Beijing Misty poets Pseudonymous writers