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.
Daniela Hăisan
Author
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.