Messages, Sages and Ages, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2021) DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5336157 17  Daniela Hăisan Faculty of Letters and Communication Sciences, Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, 13 Universităţii Street, 720229 Suceava, Romania e-mail: danielahaisan@litere.usv.ro (MIS)REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST: OTILIA CAZIMIR AS AN AUTHOR-TRANSLATOR Abstract Although her name has for a long time been synonymous with children’s poetry mainly, Otilia Cazimir (1894-1967) was also a most influential journalist and an eminently successful (copy)editor. An accomplished polytranslator, she translated into Romanian over 50 volumes mainly from Russian, French and English along her 55 years of literary activity. Oftentimes, she worked on drafts made by other translators from German or Chinese, which she edited and refined. She derived her own practico-theory from her long-lived career in translation, massively preoccupied with the congeniality (in Venuti’s 1995 terms) between translators and the authors the works of whom they translate. Based on a corpus of translations from French (Maupassant’s novel Une vie) and from English (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World), ours is an eclectic paper, combining the biographic and sociologic perspectives (translator’s habitus, translator’s voice, Mona Baker’s 2000 forensic stylistics etc.) with the traditional comparative analysis and a touch of archival research in order to account for this Romanian writer who is (mis)remembered as a children’s author only, in spite of the fact that she viewed and practised translation as much more than a mere exercise in style. Keywords: authorship, literary translation, stylist, (mis)remembering, archival view / research Introduction Historically, writers were most reasonably among the first to undertake translation. In most cultures there are glorious examples of authors translating other authors’ works and the Romanian culture is no exception. On the contrary, it owes a lot to those men of letters whose groundbreaking work as translators (notably in the latter half of the 19 th century and most of the 20 th ) effectively and spectacularly revived their national language and literature. Given their substantial overlap, writing and translating have always been found mutually beneficial, irrespective of whether translation is a hobby, a refuge, a springboard for creative / personal writing, or a necessity for the (aspiring) writer. Our case in point, namely Otilia Cazimir, is noteworthy for the fact that she practically lived off translations. Better known as an author of children’s poetry, she was nevertheless a highly prolific translator as well, whose 55-year-long career cannot and should not be overlooked. Far from being a mere side activity, translation was a daily practice for her which facilitated rather than competed with her other activities: fiction-writing, journalism, copy-editing etc. With an impressive list of translations into Romanian (over 50 volumes mainly from French, Russian and English, to which we might add her work on rough drafts made by other translators from  Daniela Hăisan is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania. Her research interests include English morphology, ESP, translated (children’s) literature and discourse analysis. She has published five books and over 60 papers on various topics in translation and morphosyntax.