Maria Kodama, widow of famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, died Sunday March 26 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
also died at the age of 86, in June 1986, in the Swiss city of Geneva, two months after marrying Maria Kodama.
His passion for literature has never wavered.
Even when ill, she was able to write her last work,
La divisa punzo
(untranslated), in which she retraces the story of the controversial 19th century Argentine statesman Juan Manuel de Rosas, in collaboration with the writer Claudia Farias Gomez.
A meeting at 16
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.
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“
I miss Borges and the way we had fun.
My friends used to say to me: "Going out with the old man of the labyrinths (a frequent image in the works of Borges), it's scary
"
.
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 talk at the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico.
Her definition of their bond is blunt: "
I never felt that the man dominated me or that I was inferior
".
From the time when Borges was tipped each year for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Maria Kodama remembers that “
everyone stopped him in the street and said to him: I hope you will win it
”.
The prize was never awarded to him.
The inseparable companion of the author of "Fictions", "
The Book of Sand
", "
The Aleph
" or even "
The Brodie Report
" created, in 1988, the Jorge Luis Borges Foundation.