ABSTRACT
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.
