venuti

Chapter 2CanonWords in One Language Elegantly us’dWill hardly in another be excus’d,And some that Rome admir’d in Caesars TimeMay neither suit Our Genius nor our Clime.The Genuine Sence, intelligibly Told,Shews a Translator both Discreet and Bold.Earl of RoscommonFluency emerges in English-language translation during the earlymodern period, a feature of aristocratic literary culture inseventeenth-century England, and over the next two hundredyears it is valued for diverse reasons, cultural and social, inaccordance with the vicissitudes of the hegemonic classes. At thesame time, the illusion of transparency produced in fluenttranslation enacts a thoroughgoing domestication that masks themanifold conditions of the translated text, its exclusionary impacton foreign cultural values, but also on those at home, eliminatingtranslation strategies that resist transparent discourse, closing offany thinking about cultural and social alternatives that do notfavor English social elites. The dominance of fluency in Englishlanguagetranslation until today has led to the forgetting of theseconditions and exclusions, requiring their recovery to interveneagainst the contemporary phase of this dominance. The followinggenealogy aims to trace the rise of fluency as a canon of Englishlanguagetranslation, showing how it achieved canonical status,interrogating its exclusionary effects on the canon of foreignliteratures in English, and reconsidering the cultural and socialvalues that it excludes at home.