The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Chapter 2
Canon
Words in One Language Elegantly us’d
Will hardly in another be excus’d,
And some that Rome admir’d in Caesars Time
May neither suit Our Genius nor our Clime.
The Genuine Sence, intelligibly Told,
Shews a Translator both Discreet and Bold.
Earl of Roscommon
Fluency emerges in English-language translation during the early
modern period, a feature of aristocratic literary culture in
seventeenth-century England, and over the next two hundred
years it is valued for diverse reasons, cultural and social, in
accordance with the vicissitudes of the hegemonic classes. At the
same time, the illusion of transparency produced in fluent
translation enacts a thoroughgoing domestication that masks the
manifold conditions of the translated text, its exclusionary impact
on foreign cultural values, but also on those at home, eliminating
translation strategies that resist transparent discourse, closing off
any thinking about cultural and social alternatives that do not
favor English social elites. The dominance of fluency in Englishlanguage
translation until today has led to the forgetting of these
conditions and exclusions, requiring their recovery to intervene
against the contemporary phase of this dominance. The following
genealogy aims to trace the rise of fluency as a canon of Englishlanguage
translation, showing how it achieved canonical status,
interrogating its exclusionary effects on the canon of foreign
literatures in English, and reconsidering the cultural and social
values that it excludes at home.