Duo Duo

Duo Duo 多多 (Beijing; 1951-) is the pen name of Chinese poet Li Shizheng, one of the great writers from the Misty Poet school of the 1970s. He chose his name which means 'too much, too much' from the given name of his daughter who died in infancy. A former opera singer, he has been called a 'master of Chinese language' who dreams 'between reality and the poetic realm.'

Duo Duo began reading and writing poetry at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966 he was sent for ‘reformation’ at a farm in Baiyangdian where he would, ironically, go on to meet such contemporary poets like Mang Ke, Shi Zhi along with Bei Dao, his classmate, who would officially form what would be later known as the Misty Poets literary movement. Despite a lack of formal college education Duo Duo read widely as to what was available, and his writing was directly inspired by the likes of Baudelaire, Pushkin, Eliot, Tsvetaeva, Lorca and Plath. His beginning poems were politically condemning in nature, short and elliptical, however his style shifted in the mid-1980s towards more philosophical and essayistic constructions paying more attention to syntax, repetition and rhetoric. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Duo Duo left China along with many other dissident poets. Splitting his time between the UK, Canada and Netherlands, Duo Duo became widely translated and published many poems that dealt with the various meditations on exiled rootlessness. Despite his Western influence and global reach, Duo Duo’s poetry still remains grounded in classical Chinese prosody, carving out instead a new tradition of his own. He returned to China in 2004 to great acclaim and is currently teaching at Hainan University.

His translations into English include the verse collections Looking Out from Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square (1989), Crossing the Sea (1998) and The Boy Who Catches Wasps (2002) as well as Snow Plain (2010), a recent collection of short stories. Duo Duo is the twenty-first laureate of the Neustadt Prize and the first Chinese recipient of the award, having been nominated as a ‘a resolute seer of some of the most basic, universal human values that have often been shadowed in our troubled modern time: creativity, nature, love, dreams, and wishful thinking.’