Mary Kodamawidow ofJorge Luis Borgesand alphabet of the work of the great Argentine writer, died at the age of 86, confirmed Infobae Culture. The author died in Vicente López, after going through health problems that had made it difficult for her to move in recent months.
The news of his death was confirmed by his lawyer,Fernando Soto, who wrote on Twitter: “Now you will enter the ‘great sea’ with your dear Borges. May you rest in peace, Maria.” According to different sources, she had been suffering from breast cancer for a few months and in the final stage she remained confined in her house.
As a graduate in Literature, she participated in a course in which she met Borges, who is 38 years older, in the ’60s, with whom she began to relate due to their shared interest in Anglo-Saxon languages. From that moment they forged a close relationship, and over time she became her trusted person to the point that in 1988, two years after the death of the author of The Alpehcreated the Jorge Luis Borges Foundation, from where he seeks to spread the writer’s work in the country and beyond the borders.
Together they signed two books:Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthologya compilation of the shared passion for English literature, andAtlasin which the trips made around the world were gathered, in which the impressions of the writer who already suffered from severe blindness were gathered, together with notes and photographs of Kodama.
“When they talked to me about handcuffs, I only knew the ones they put on prisoners. I did not want to get married to be a prisoner and even less have children that were going to absorb my whole life, ”Kodama had said about his relationship with the writer in an interview withtelamregarding the appearance of the memoir bookMaria Kodama. Slave of freedom.
However, on April 26, 1986, they were married, a few months before the death of Borges, who already resided in Geneva, Switzerland, where he is buried. The marriage was carried out by proxy in Asunción, Paraguay.
In addition, he wrote his own asReportsyTribute to Borgesand last year presentedof the badge punched(South American)
In 2009, a trial began against the writerPablo Katchadjianwhom he accused of plagiarism in 2009 forEl Alephfattened,a text in which he added 5,600 words to the original and published in a small edition of just 200 copies. In 2017, Katchadjian won the trial and in 2021 the lack of merit was ruled and this led to Civil Court No. 1 establishing that Kodama had to pay 888,000 pesos, of which 200,000 are execution costs.
In 2019 he starred in another controversy withAlberto Fernandezpresident of Argentina, when rejecting the initiative to create a “Borges Museum” with manuscripts donated by the businessmanAlejandro Roemmers. “The writer and businessman Alejandro Roemmers offered me to donate to the Argentine State more than 6,000 books and manuscripts by Jorge Luis Borges from his collection. With this contribution we are going to create the Borges Museum, in homage to the greatest man in letters that our country has ever had,” the president-elect wrote on his Twitter account.Twitter.
However, Kodama stated that the books that the businessman intended to provide had been “stolen” from Borges by a domestic employee. After the indictment, Roemmers claimed that he had “supporting documentation” to prove that Borges’ papers were legitimately acquired.
In 2021, the writer and professor of Letters dared to talk about herself and her story prior to her meeting with Borges in the autobiographyMaria Kodama. Slave of freedom, which he wrote together with the journalist Mario Mactas. There she expanded on two aspects: the envy that the writer’s decision to name her heir to his work aroused in “friends” and his insistence on wanting to get married.
Kodama was born in Buenos Aires in 1937, the daughter of María Antonia Schweizer, of Swiss-German, English and Spanish descent, and the Japanese chemist Yosaburo Kodama.