Writer Maria Kodama, widow of Jorge Luis Borges, dies aged 86

Maria Kodama, widow of famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, died Sunday March 26, 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the age of 86 following cancer, her family announced to the local press. Maria Kodama was a writer, translator, collaborator and heir to the work of Borges, considered by literary critics to be one of the greatest poets, essayists and short story writers of his time.

The famous author of Fictions, The Book of Sand or The Aleph, also died at the age of 86, in June 1986, in the Swiss city of Geneva, two months after marrying Maria Kodama.

Meeting with Jorge Luis Borges at the age of 16

Maria Kodama’s passion for literature has never wavered. Even sick, she was able to write her last work, La divisa punzo (untranslated), in which she traces the story of the controversial 19th century Argentine statesman Juan Manuel de Rosas, in collaboration with the writer Claudia Farias Gomez.

Her relationship with Borges began when they discovered a common love for the English language, Old Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic. She met him when she was only 16 and studying literature. Her father had taken her to listen to a lecture by the author.

“I miss Borges”, she said

“I miss Borges and the way we had fun. My friends used to tell me: Going out with the old man of the labyrinths (a frequent image in Borges’s works) is frightening. But come and meet him: he’s a hilarious person and mazes fascinate me. I had a good time with him. I’m not a masochist, he was a very nice person”, she said during a conference at the Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. His definition of their bond is straightforward: “I never felt like the man dominated me or that I was inferior.”

Of the time when Borges was tipped each year for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Maria Kodama recalls that “everyone stopped him in the street and said: I hope you will win it“. The prize was never awarded to her. In 1988, she had created the Jorge Luis Borges Foundation.