Cèsar August Jordana (Barcelona, 1893 - Santiago de Chile, 1958) was a fiction writer, novelist, translator, critic, journalist, and grammarian. He studied engineering but left the profession after deciding to work full-time in the world of letters. Committed to the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile in France in 1939, and subsequently in Chile together with other Catalan writers including Xavier Benguerel, Domènec Guansé, Joan Oliver, and Francesc Trabal. He eventually moved to Buenos Aires where he worked as a literary advisor to the publisher Editorial Sudamericana, as well as translating and writing his own literary works.

He published the novels El collar de la Núria (1927), L’incest (1927), L’anell i la fàbrica (1928), Una mena d’amor (1931), El Rusio i el Pelao (1950), and El món de Joan Ferrer, which appeared posthumously in 1971. Also notable were his short stories in the collections Quatre venjances (1923), Tot de contes (1929), and Tres a la reraguarda. Altres contes, apunts, esplai, the latter of which won the 1940 Concepció Rabell Prize of the “Jocs Florals” literary awards in Buenos Aires. Of particular importance are his translations of classics by Molière, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, as well as the range of manuals and studies of grammar he produced, among them El català i el castellà comparats (1968) and Nou vocabulari de barbarismes, which was published in 1992.

A prolific writer and tireless in his cultural endeavours, Cèsar August Jordana is an outstanding figure in the twentieth-century Catalan literary scene.

 

Web page: Toni Terrades for the Association of Catalan Language Writers (AELC).
Photographs: C.A. Jordana, in Paris, November 1939. © Arxiu Joan Jordana. From Centenari C.A. Jordana (1983-1993). Barcelona: Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, 1993.