A niece of Borges's widow becomes the new administrator of the writer's assets

María Victoria Kodama, niece of the deceased María Kodama, widow and main disseminator of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, will be the one who will administer the rights to the work of the Argentine author.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
03 June 2023 Saturday 04:26
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A niece of Borges's widow becomes the new administrator of the writer's assets

María Victoria Kodama, niece of the deceased María Kodama, widow and main disseminator of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, will be the one who will administer the rights to the work of the Argentine author. She is one of the five nieces who presented themselves as heirs when the succession for the inheritance of the widow of Borges became vacant because the woman she died on March 26 without having made a will.

To date, the widow was the owner of movable and immovable property and the universal heir of her husband. Or, what is the same, she was the owner of all the literary work, in addition to being the owner of all the medals, decorations and distinctions received by the Argentine writer, original manuscripts, drawings of her authorship and her personal library. (intervened by Borges himself), among many other assets of high cultural, historical and patrimonial value.

The niece will only be able to dispose of and collect on account of the succession when the declaration of heirs comes out, as explained to EFE by the lawyer and creditor of the widow, Fernando Soto, who asked the Justice in April to make an inventory of the assets of the widow, something that for the moment has not been done.

María Kodama, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1937, met Borges (1899-1986) when she was 16 years old and he was 54, when she bumped into him on the street, at the exit of a bookstore. She told him that she was going to study Literature and he invited her to study ancient English together, from which time they were never separated again.

Despite the fact that in 1967 Borges married another woman, Elsa Astete, María Kodama continued to see the Argentine writer and they finally got married in 1986, months before the writer's death from liver cancer in Geneva.

Two years after the death of the creator of El Aleph, in 1988, María Kodama created the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation in Buenos Aires, whose headquarters house countless personal objects.

Borges's widow waited until the last moment to make the will, when she prepared to do so the people around her did not give her the means to carry out the act of last will and when they wanted to react it was too late, because the widow was no longer able to to be able to make a will.