The Boy Who Catches Wasps: Selected Poetry of Duo Duo

by Duo Duo, Gregory Lee (Translator)

Overview

Duo Duo began to write poetry in the early 1970s when the Cultural Revolution was still in full swing. He was obliged to write clandestinely, never imagining he would have readers. He continued to write throughout the 1980s, publishing in samizdat publications, and then more openly as the authorities relaxed their grip. Duo Duo left China for a reading tour of England June 4th 1989, the morning after the Tiananmen massacre that he had witnessed.

Duo Duo’s poetic vision embraces a historical and political vision that is much more diverse, more global than that circumscribed by the confines of the last third of China’s twentieth century. The context of China, Duo Duo’s lived experience, is necessarily present in the poet’s imaginary, but it is diffused in a world-view that embraces all of modern humanity’s dilemmas, our increasing separation from nature, and our alienation from one another. The exile, like the hybrid and other "in between" subjects, writes of China with the benefit of critical distance, but also writes with an exceptional perspective of wherever he finds himself.

Before leaving China, Duo Duo worked as a journalist. His writing has been widely translated and published throughout the world, including two small selections of his work—in English—published in the UK and Canada. Generally associated with the other menglong (ambiguist) poets, such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian. Duo Duo currently lives and teaches in the Netherlands.

Gregory Lee currently lives in France and teaches at l’Universityé Jean Moulin Lyon III. He has also taught at the Universityies of Cambridge, London, Chicago and Hong Kong. His translations of Duo Duo and other Chinese poets have appeared in numerous publications, including Fissures: Chinese Writing Today (Zephyr Press), and Abandoned Wine (Wellsweep Press).

Also available
Fissures: Chinese Writing Today

• CUSA

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780939010707
Publisher:	Zephyr Press
Publication date:	05/01/2002
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)
Language:	Chinese

About the Author

Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. As a boy during the Cultural Revolution, Duo Duo studied at a school in the Baiyangding countryside, where he began to write poetry. He and some of his childhood classmates are considered part of the "Misty" school of contemporary Chinese poetry. His primary collection in English translation is THE BOY WHO CATCHES WASPS translated by Gregory Lee (Zephyr Press, 2002). Initially, Duo Duo's poems were short and referenced many Western poets. In the 1980s his poems grew longer and more philosophical in nature. The morning after witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Duo Duo flew to London, where he was scheduled to give a poetry reading at the British Museum. It was well over a decade before he returned to China, instead residing in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands. His distance from China incited the second shift in his poetry: he began to write of exile and wandering. Upon his 2004 return to China, the literary community received him with honor. Presently, Duo Duo resides on Hainan Island and teaches at Hainan University. In the fall of 2009 an international jury representing nine countries selected the critically acclaimed Chinese poet Duo Duo as The 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sponsored by The University of Oklahoma and its international magazine, World Literature Today.