Bakhtin

Very useful is the insight of Mikhail Bakhtin that all literary texts have multiple speakers or voices (the technical terms are dialogics and heteroglossia). A single line of poetry, contrary to the view of critics earlier than him, has more than one voice that we the readers can hear. A single line of second-language poetry, then, can be said to have the voice of the second language plus the voice of the mother tongue, in addition to the voices that Bakhtin identified. If we are to fully understand and appreciate the single line of poetry (and, of course, entire poems and works of literature), we must listen and hear these two voices, as well as all the other voices identified by dialogics.