What is it about?
The author Max Frisch created a questionnaire about belonging and national identity during a visit to the USA in 1971. This series of questions provoked a multilingual reaction with dozens of languages, as a multilingual poet "belongs" not to one but to many languages and cultures - or they belong to the poet.
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Photo by Cosmin Andrei Buzamat on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Polyglot authors and especially hyperpolyglot (more than 6-7 languages) do not feel comfortable when identified and referred to in single terms based on their country of birth or "first language" (when they often have several "first" languages), or when researchers try to squeeze them into national literary models. This essay - in linguistic terms as well as contents - contributes to the ongoing debate about one versus more "homelands" and languages of multilingual authors.
Perspectives
As a literary multilingualism scholar, co-founder of the avantgarde research group LangueFlow (langueflow.eu), and a polyglot and multicultural poet who writes in many dozens of languages, I am acutely aware that the common criteria which have been employed for decades in research for categorizing and identifying the languages and cultures of multilingual writers is outdated. This contribution is playful on the surface but encourages the exploration of new ways of describing where a multilingual writer "belongs".
Dr. Sabira Ståhlberg
Independent Scholar
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Essay: Does a Polyglot Poet Have a Heimat?, Journal of Literary Multilingualism, July 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/2667324x-2026xx15.
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Contributors
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