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Image:Duoduo.jpg

Duo Duo 多多 (1951 - ) is the pen name of Li Shizhen (栗世征), one of the "Misty" or "Obscure" school of modern Chinese poetry (朦胧诗). He was born in Beijing. As a youth in the Cultural Revolution, he was sent down to the countryside in Baiyangding (白洋汀), where he began reading and writing poetry. During this time he met other poets of the as-yet underground Misty school, such as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng and Mang Ke. Duo Duo's early poems are short and elliptical, with many barbed political references. He was heavily influenced by Western poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Sylvia Plath. His style underwent a shift in the 80's 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" (诲教), which spoke for China's "lost generation" as much as Bei Dao's "Answer".

In 1989 Duo Duo was involved in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and had to flee abroad. He lived in exile for many years in Europe, mostly in England, Germany 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 more self-consciously. Sometimes his poems border on nonsense, and yet are highly effective, such as the poem "Watching the Sea"(看海).

In 2004 Duo Duo was finally allowed to return to China, where he was honored both by a younger generation of poets and by the authorities. The same year he received the official Xinhua News Agency's Poet of the Year Award.

Translation of Duo Duo's poems into English by Gregory E. Lee [1]