María Kodama, widow of Jorge Luis Borges, has died this Sunday at the age of 86. The news of his death has been confirmed by his lawyer, Fernando Soto, on Twitter: “Now you will enter the ‘great sea’ with your beloved Borges. May you rest in peace, Maria.” A translator and professor of Literature, Kodama suffered from breast cancer and lived on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.. She had married the fundamental writer of Argentine literature in April 1986, two months before his death, and since then she has been in charge of his work and legacy, which he has jealously protected.
Daughter of a Japanese chemist and an Argentine, María Kodama was born on March 10, 1937 and studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. She specialized in Anglo-Saxon literature, of which she made translations into Spanish. Kodama met the writer as a student in the sixties. He was 38 years older. They signed two books together: Short Anglo-Saxon Anthology, a compilation of one of their great joint passions, English literature; and Atlas, a book of his travels published in 1984 with the impressions of the writer, fiercely attacked by the blindness that accompanied him for decades, and the notes and photographs of his companion. Borges and Kodama traveled the world from 1975, when they made their first trip to the United States, until the end of 1985, when the writer was diagnosed with liver cancer and they moved to Geneva. There they married and Borges declared her his heir.
In 1988, Kodama created the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation, which he presided over until his death. As guardian of Borges’s work, Kodama sued another writer for experimenting with The Aleph, his most famous story, and even fought with the current president, Alberto Fernández. In 2019, the president tried to create a museum for the writer with the personal file of a collector, and Kodama disapproved: he then denounced that many of the 30,000 objects that the businessman Alejandro Roemmers was going to donate to the State were stolen.
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