María Kodama
passed away this Sunday
in her apartment at the Lois Suites hotel, on Vicente López street, in Recoleta, where she had moved some time ago after living long decades in Rodríguez Peña and Juncal.
She was 86 years old and suffered from breast cancer.
She left the express will not to be veiled and to be buried in the Memorial Park, in Pilar.
The final farewell will be this Monday.
This unique woman, who
only answered calls before seven in the morning,
was responsible
for administering the legacy of Jorge Luis Borges,
one of the geniuses of world literature of the 20th century, and undoubtedly the most influential Argentine writer, dealing with at the same time with the immeasurable leap in the history of letters and publishing that represented the advent of the digital sphere, at the beginning of the 90s, and with the public opinion of a country of moderate attachment to the law.
Fernando Soto, her lawyer, still did not want to talk about what will happen to the rights to the writer's works.
Before any hasty judgment about your figure, it would be wise to take those circumstances into account.
She was born on March 10, 1937 in Buenos Aires, the daughter of María Antonia Schweizer and Yosaburo Kodama, a chemist of Japanese origin.
She had a degree in Literature from the UBA and she met Borges in the 70s, in a seminar on Old Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, which they were both studying to read
The Canterbury Tales
in the original version by G. Chaucer.
She was born on March 10, 1937 in Buenos Aires, the daughter of María Antonia Schweizer and Yosaburo Kodama, a chemist of Japanese origin.
AP Photo / Alexandre Meneghini
Jorge Luis Borges
already needed someone to read to him and he could barely see some colors, but his world prestige had been enormous since the late 1960s, after he won the Formentor prize, shared with Samuel Beckett, and held a cycle of literary conferences at the University of Austin, in Texas, of enormous impact in the academy and the letters of the United States.
Since then they were friends.
In the mid-70s it was common to see them arrive (Borges, with a cane and holding his arm) to the East Gallery, where they would sit for a while to talk and browse in the City Library
.
That was right in front of Borges' apartment, on Maipú street.
Later
, they studied Icelandic to learn about the ancient Nordic sagas of warriors - together they would fulfill the dream of traveling to Iceland, getting to know its landscapes and a priest who married them according to their original cult, an ogre of enormous size whose photo is exhibited in Borges Foundation.
Kodama
systematically rectified that she was never his personal secretary, but rather his study partner, and as such he collaborated with Borges in a
Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology
(1978), and in the translation of
La alucinación de Gylfi,
a volume of the
Minor Edda,
by Snorri Sturluson.
Live.
02-16-20Maria Kodama.
In the 1980s, with each time closer proximity,
Kodama
embarked him on
a journey required by several cities, in which an already elderly Borges gave lectures
and was received at universities as one of the masters of the 20th century - adding promotions in hot air balloon, exotic at the time, which the writer must have felt like a strong breeze on his face.
This verification of Borges's worldwide fervor crystallized in
Atlas
(1984), an illustrated travel book, with a profusion of photos of him together with María and texts conceived more for current affairs magazines than for serious reading.
Those were the years in which
Borges was also lavished in his country,
in publications and on the radio, in sometimes learned public conversations, always full of that humor that passed without warning of biographical detail and tenderness for a world in extinction at the same time. political acidity, with the intact edge of the times of the first Peronism.
It was not a detail of that bond that Borges had always been
unlucky in matters of love
, from his first marriage to Elsa Astete and the truncated relationship with Estela Canto and the humiliating crush on Silvina Bullrich.
The theme of love appears in very few Borgean stories and its few female characters -even the most sublime of Argentine literature, Beatriz Viterbo- tend to be the
subject of a dispute between two men;
who narrates, always on the losing side
.
On the contrary, María Kodama was a blank page,
a kind of Lolita whose oriental features must have facilitated the recreation of her face in the blind and autumnal gallant,
the least expected Virgil, who led her through the Encyclopedia Britannica and the sagas. archaic.
Kodama systematically rectified that she was never his personal secretary, but rather his study partner, and as such he collaborated with Borges in a Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology (1978), and in the translation of La alucinación de Gylfi, a volume of the Minor Edda, by Snorri Sturluson.
Photo Ludovic MARIN / AFP
Over the years, they were seen together more and more, around town and abroad.
Always ethereal, classic, and with youthful discretion, she had already entered maturity and wore
unusual two-tone hair that early on made gray stand out and that became her trademark
.
Kodama
was always very flirtatious;
everything indicates that she even changed the year of her birth in the marriage book, where she was recorded as born in 1941. And she continued to treat Borges about you, with the same formula of filial respect, not without sensuality, that she intended for her father.
Literary widows are quite an institution;
hold the copyright and the torch;
and although there have been them of all kinds, the iron cancerberas are a traditional variety.
Kodama performed that function with its own style.
He took care of the original detail in the clothing with pleasure: he cared about looking cool, it was evident that he did not want to dress in Argentine fashion.
In those years, the 1980s, Borges began to distance himself from his great friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, which he attributed to the direct influence of María.
In conversations with relatives, Bioy did not hide his certainty that she
"took possession of him"
and
reproached him for the decision to settle abroad in his last years of life,
so painful for the inhabitants of the well-known apartment on Posadas street (
" Borges eats at home today"
), given that it motivated Georgie to cut ties with his lifelong environment, with the city he loved and where he was increasingly recognized on the street.
A few months before Borges' death, on April 26, 1986, Kodama and the writer, who already resided in Switzerland, were married by proxy in Asunción, Paraguay.
Photo EFE/Emilio Naranjo
The figure of
Kodama
is hardly mentioned in the thousand pages of
Borges
, Bioy's diary;
By the time it was published, in 2005, she already had
a history of being a plenipotentiary widow, at times capricious,
and of letting herself be advised by trial lawyers.
Perhaps over time the scrupulously elided references will return to Bioy's memories.
A few months before Borges's death, on April 26, 1986, Kodama and the writer, who already resided in Switzerland, were married by proxy in Asunción, Paraguay;
inconceivably, Kodama also had to explain it away.
Borges had been dealing with cancer for some time and according to the widow,
it was his express decision that the farewell not take place in Buenos Aires
.
Another fact that his friend Bioy Casares
regretted
was not having been able to have one last talk with him, because his farewell was almost a marketing design, with the writer Héctor Bianchotti together with Kodama.
A grave flush with the ground, with a
kitsch tombstone that brings together a high relief of Viking soldiers, a Welsh cross, inscriptions in Anglo-Saxon and a verse from the Norwegian
Volsung
saga , from the 13th century, all details that increase the strangeness of its origin and his language,
in that cemetery in Geneva.
On one side it reads
Jorge Luis Borges
and below "And ne forhtedon na" along with a circular engraving with seven warriors.
a small Welsh cross and the years 1899/1986.
The phrase is in Anglo-Saxon and can be translated as: "And that they did not fear" The other side contains the phrase "Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr í methal theira bert" which is related to a chapter of the Norwegian saga of the 13th century Volsung .
These verses can be translated as: "He took the sword Gram and placed it between them drawn."
Nothing was easy for Kodama in Argentina, where he had to face the legal relativism and the fanned,
the political rift, which persisted since the 50s
, and the rejection, although not exactly from the most popular sectors.
On the contrary, the public rushed to take photos of him;
We attest that in recent years she enjoyed that popularity a lot and was delighted to take selfies
with
strangers
.
Going through the Book Fair with her was a mass bath.
Perhaps Kodama's most mistaken moment was when facing, in 2009, the publication and support of many writers for
El Aleph engordado
, Pablo Katchadjian's story.
The author was prosecuted and was seized for 80,000 pesos.
It is a reversal, expanded to around 5,600 words, of Borges' most emblematic and universal tale.
Kodama
erred on extreme classicism,
he failed to realize to what extent the cultural parameters that had justly enthroned Borges already belonged to the past
and not to our post-Gutenberg era.
It was useless to try to reason with her about the deep antipathy generated by her position,
the expansion of Borges that the new text could bring about, Katchadjian's right to rework the work of an author canonized decades ago.
It is enough to compare this literary operation today with the concepts of augmented reality and collage, today transversal in all the arts, and even with the recent appropriation by the theater director Castellucci based on
Mahler's
Resurrection symphony.
Kodama
continued to call it plagiarism forever and went on to demand a pound of meat,
a token payment for the use of the title, one dollar.
The brawl escalated to what we can take as
an incredible act of
bullying
at the National Library
, with the assistance and support of great contemporary authors.
Maria Kodama.
This unique woman, who only answered calls before seven in the morning, was responsible for managing the legacy of Jorge Luis Borges.
The insults were not lacking, all against Kodama.
A modest observation: Borges had chosen neither an experienced editor nor an experimental poet
to manage his legacy , but María Kodama, with her traditionalist baggage,
as conservative as he, even at times just as recalcitrant.
In December 2019, a newly elected Alberto Fernández announced the initiative of a "Borges Museum", with manuscripts donated by businessman Alejandro Roemmers.
Everything suggests that he announced it before consulting her.
The president proposed to bridge the gap, when the first Peronism had fired Borges from the Library to name him "Poultry Inspector."
The widow flatly refused, arguing that
the books provided by the businessman had been stolen from Borges by a domestic employee,
and the project came to nothing.
A few weeks later, the Minister of Culture Tristán Bauer erased it with his elbow by
ordering Borges' phrase that crowned the front of the CCK with blue neon letters to be quietly taken down:
"No one is the homeland and we all are."
There is much that deserves to be studied in detail in the administration of the Borges legacy;
Only now can this inquiry be autonomous and reliable.
Among Kodama's regular tasks was
combating versions of Borges's work that were badly transposed on the web
(what is known as “corrupt versions”) and urbi et orbi pirated editions.
Kodama was criticized for her acceptance of
publishing Borges' stories piece by piece, dismantling his classic storybooks
, always published as a unit, even submitting them to
translators who were not always up to his standards
- this earned him
the final insult of Norman di Giovanni, his historical translator. to English-
.
Already in this century the legacy was welcomed by the
Andrew Wylie agency, known as El Jackal.
For more than fifteen years, an emblematic portrait of Borges has decorated, like the greatest gem in a crown of great writers, the fireplace of Wylie House in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury.
MS
look too
María Kodama, writer and widow of Jorge Luis Borges, died
Maria Kodama: so fragile, she seemed immortal
A funny Maria through the streets of Geneva