Writer and translator María Kodama, who was best known for guarding the legacy of her husband, the legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, died March 26. She was 86. The New York Times reported that for years Kodama was Borges's secretary, aide, and traveling companion. A few months before he died in 1986, they married and Borges bequeathed the rights to his works to her. Soon after his death, she established the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation "to further the appreciation of his writing and protect it from what she viewed as misappropriation and misinterpretation."
In the days since Kodama's death, there have been news reports that she apparently left no will and the status of the Borges estate is in limbo, the Times noted. Fernando Soto, her lawyer, told the Associated Press: "She didn't like to talk about those issues. She didn't talk about her death."
Kodama was devoted to Borges, who had lost his eyesight by the time he began working with her. "She would read to him, and he fell in love with her voice," Andrew Wylie, her literary agent in New York, said, "which was something that you could easily imagine him doing, because her voice was very particular and interesting and lovely."
At a presentation recorded by the Library of Congress in 2017, Kodama said that she first encountered Borges's work when she was five years old and a woman who was tutoring her in English read her two of his poems, which had been written, in English, to a woman he was interested in at the time. When she was 12, "she was taken to a lecture he gave. A few years later, now a budding scholar, she ran into him at a bookstore in Buenos Aires. She told him she had heard him speak when she was a girl; he invited her to join a study group he was leading on Anglo-Saxon literature," the Times wrote.
Biographers "have long speculated on the nature of their relationship, but there is no doubt that she read to him, took his dictation, eventually traveled with him extensively and on some works was essentially his collaborator--for instance, his Atlas (1984) was a collection of essays and stories based on their travels together," the Times wrote, adding that the years after Borges's death "were often contentious ones" for Kodama, who did some writing of her own, including publishing Homage to Borges, a collection of lectures she had given about him, in 2016, "but much of her time was consumed with fighting legal challenges and bringing some herself over rights, translations and other issues."
Despite the controversies, Wylie said that Kodama and Borges were a good fit: "She was a lovely and brilliant complement to his genius, which was considerable."