What do you think?
Rate this book
Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, this authoritative new collection by one of China’s most lauded poets is “a thrill to read” (Drew Calvert, Asymptote)
“Words as Grain offers Zen koan-like poems that call for rereading and contemplation. As the poet himself says in ‘Reading Great Poems,’ ‘let the dialogue between thought and silence continue.’ We are fortunate to be a party to this sustained and intense dialogue.”—John Bradley, Rain Taxi
While keeping a cautious distance from literary trends and labeling, Duo Duo has emerged as one of the world’s preeminent poets. His poems respond to the Chinese political landscape from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square tragedy and beyond. Some are written from the vantage point of exile abroad, others in his homeland, but all inscribe an ache for original expression, a sense of place, and the essence of language. In exacting renderings by award-winning translator Lucas Klein, this career-spanning anthology features Duo Duo’s entire oeuvre since his return to China in 2004, as well as a representative selection of his earlier poems, presenting nearly five decades of work. This collection traces the evolution, in a particular historical context and cultural tradition, of one of the most vibrant poets at work in the world today.
“Words as Grain offers Zen koan-like poems that call for rereading and contemplation. As the poet himself says in ‘Reading Great Poems,’ ‘let the dialogue between thought and silence continue.’ We are fortunate to be a party to this sustained and intense dialogue.”—John Bradley, Rain Taxi
While keeping a cautious distance from literary trends and labeling, Duo Duo has emerged as one of the world’s preeminent poets. His poems respond to the Chinese political landscape from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square tragedy and beyond. Some are written from the vantage point of exile abroad, others in his homeland, but all inscribe an ache for original expression, a sense of place, and the essence of language. In exacting renderings by award-winning translator Lucas Klein, this career-spanning anthology features Duo Duo’s entire oeuvre since his return to China in 2004, as well as a representative selection of his earlier poems, presenting nearly five decades of work. This collection traces the evolution, in a particular historical context and cultural tradition, of one of the most vibrant poets at work in the world today.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published May 25, 2021
2 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
Duo Duo
44 books13 followersDuo 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.’
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.’
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 23, 2021
If No Echo, No Monologue
wordless, but not quite silent
unless to say love, unless not to speak
—there is leftover gunpowder in this line
becoming a simplified beginning
poetry is a sky giving this its performance
(p111)
wordless, but not quite silent
unless to say love, unless not to speak
—there is leftover gunpowder in this line
becoming a simplified beginning
poetry is a sky giving this its performance
(p111)
August 5, 2022
A captivating, challenging, and delightfully abstract set.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews