Writer María Kodama, widow of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, dies

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According to her family, she died of cancer. Kodama was a writer, translator, collaborator and universal heir to Borges’ work. María Kodama, in 2018, in Buenos Aires Ludovic Marin/AFP María Kodama, widow of the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, died this Sunday (26) in Buenos Aires, at the age of 86, as a result of breast cancer, reported the family to the local press. Kodama was a writer, translator, collaborator and universal heir to Borges’ work, considered by academic literary critics as one of the greatest poets, essayists and short story writers of his time. The famous author of “Ficciones”, also died at the age of 86, in June 1986, in the city of Geneva, Switzerland, two months after marrying Kodama. His passion for letters never waned. Even though she was ill, she wrote her last work, “La divisa punzó”, in which she revisits the story of the controversial 19th-century federal caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, in collaboration with the writer Claudia Farías Gómez. Her relationship with Borges began when they discovered a shared love of the English language, including Old Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic. The writer met her when she was only 16 years old and studying Literature. Her father had taken her to attend a lecture by the author of “Brodie’s Report”, “Universal History of Infamy” and “The Book of Sand”. “I miss Borges and how much fun we had. My friends used to tell me, ‘How do you hang out with the old man from the labyrinths (a frequent image in his essays). He’s amazing!’ I love labyrinths. I had a lot of fun with him. I’m not a masochist; he was a lovely person,” he once said at a conference at the Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. From the times when Borges appeared each year as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kodama recalled that “everyone stopped him on the street and said: ‘I hope he wins'”. He was never contemplated. The relationship was not easy for her. “My mother used to tell me that Borges could be my grandfather and she was right because of that age difference (he’s 54 and I’m 16)”. “But on the other hand,” recalled Kodama, “when we were teenagers, my friends would talk about family and children and I didn’t want to start a family because my parents were separated and I was in the care of my grandmother.” Her definition of the bond was adamant: “I never saw a man as something that dominates me or that I was inferior”. The inseparable companion of the writer of “Inquisiciones” and “O Aleph”, she created, in 1988, the Jorge Luis Borges Foundation. See personalities who died in 2023

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