On Slow Translation

Famously, the story of English poetry begins with eating words. Bede tells us that Cædmon devoured Christian teaching and Bible stories, and ruminated on them overnight, before converting those stories into the sweetest songs, like a cow chewing the cud and yielding milk.

Over a thousand years later, as scholars started looking for slower, more ruminative ways of learning and writing they again turned to food and to metaphors of eating for inspiration. The manifesto for so-called ‘slow scholarship’ declares that:

This manifesto, which clearly draws on the Slow Food movement, was perhaps intended as a tongue-in-cheek corrective to the fast-paced, stress- driven culture of contemporary academia. Since then, the call for slower forms of scholarship has been taken up with (somewhat incongruous) vigour. The first book to articulate how the principles of the Slow movement might be adopted in the academy, The Slow Professor, by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, demonstrates that slowing down need not be a retreat from everyday life, or a nostalgic return to the good old days. Rather, it can be a way of resisting the ‘discourse of crisis’ promoted by the corporate university, a sense of constant panic that leaves us feeling passive and helpless. Slowing down encourages a different kind of agency, a way of acting with purpose, taking the time for deliberation and reflection and dialogue, cultivating deep attention in our research.

To date, then, the slow scholarship movement has considered how the act of slowing down can improve both working conditions and the quality of research produced in the university as a workplace. But I opened by creating a link between slow scholarship and the poets and poetry of the distant past. I am interested in how slow scholarship might improve my knowledge of early medieval literature; but am equally interested in how the practices of that far-off age might inform my own ways of working.