Yes, this is feasible and Flash did this (optionally).
Flash supported this as a trade-off via the cacheAsBitmap attribute on elements. Basically you'd set that to true if you knew the sprite was just going to be translated around in x/y and not scaled or rotated. It wasn't on as the default for new sprites because this mode would actually bite you in the ass if the sprite was going to scale/rotate nearly each frame because the cost of recreating the "cached" version would then be added to the render time without actually ever being useful.
So it is a good idea in practical usage to make this an optional feature, though I think Flash could have been smarter about it (like soft-default to caching and only override that once it sees a scale or rotate taking place).
SVG 1.1 spec defines suspendRedraw() and unsuspendRedraw() methods which seem to have somehow similar purpose, though those can be applied only on <svg> elements, are supported only by Firefox and are going to be deprecated in SVG 2.0.
Flash supported this as a trade-off via the cacheAsBitmap attribute on elements. Basically you'd set that to true if you knew the sprite was just going to be translated around in x/y and not scaled or rotated. It wasn't on as the default for new sprites because this mode would actually bite you in the ass if the sprite was going to scale/rotate nearly each frame because the cost of recreating the "cached" version would then be added to the render time without actually ever being useful.
So it is a good idea in practical usage to make this an optional feature, though I think Flash could have been smarter about it (like soft-default to caching and only override that once it sees a scale or rotate taking place).