In the antechamber of the balcony of Barcelona City Hall, María Kodama sat in a chair while castles were erected in Plaça de Sant Jaume. It was the Day of Mercy in 2015 and the eternal widow of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was part of the delegation from Buenos Aires that had traveled to the Catalan capital as a guest city for that year's fiesta.
He was then 78 years old and still anxious to continue traveling, as he had done around the world with Borges since the late sixties, which was embodied in Atlas (1984), the writer's work with photos of Kodama, which later it gave rise to a traveling exhibition that came to present in Barcelona in 2015. "I had to describe the world to him", explained his widow with reference to the author's blindness.
She had the same cultural anxiety in Buenos Aires, where it was common to find her at cultural events, whether it was the opening of an art fair, an exhibition or a concert. Here, Kodama was always kind: with a sweet voice and patience he explained a thousand and one times his experiences with Borges, whom he revered with his words.
This image of velvet contrasted with the hatred she raised in the literary world, which criticized her for her excessive jealousy over the legacy of the writer, since she was heir to the rights of his works and this led her to several confrontations, many of which they ended up in court.
One of the litigations in which he got involved generated much more antipathy among those who considered that he had appropriated the memory of a universal Argentine. This was the case of a previously unknown Argentinian writer, Pablo Katchadjian, whom Kodama denounced in 2015 for plagiarism and fraud after publishing – 200 copies – what this author and teacher considered a “literary experiment”. Katchadjian had added 5,600 words to L' Aleph, and had retitled it El Aleph engordado. The demand motivated the repulsion of hundreds of artists who signed a manifesto against Kodama, including César Aira and Ricardo Piglia. Two years later, Kodama drank the understanding and Katchadjian's lawyer hung up the "serial litigator" sign on him.
A translator specialized in Saxon and Icelandic literature, she graduated in Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, but had met Borges long before his university years, at the age of 16, when the writer was 54.
Last year, in an interview with La Nación, Kodama recalled the extraordinary way in which he met Borges, whom he began to see immediately, despite the fact that his parents did not approve of a relationship with a man 38 years older: "One day he was going walking down [Street] Florida to buy books for school and I almost knocked over Borges. I say: 'Forgive me, I almost dropped it', and I explained that I had heard it once when I was little. 'Esclar, now you're older, what do you work at?', he asked me. 'I'm in my fourth year of high school,' I said, and added that I was thinking of studying literature because I liked reading, but I especially wanted to read Greek and Latin. Then he invited me to study Old English with him. ‘Shakespeare?’ I asked. No, much older, 6th and 7th centuries. I ask him if he wants us to study together'. And we started studying together, at the Richmond confectionery”.
Even so, the marriage with Kodama – by proxy, in Paraguay – did not take place until two months before the writer's death in Geneva in 1986.
In 1988, he founded the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation to manage the writer's legacy. In addition to Atlas, Kodama and Borges signed together Breve antología anglosajona (1978). He also published Homenaje a Borges (2016) and the book of stories Relatos (2017). And she was editor of Prisma and Proa magazines.
María Kodama died yesterday at the age of 86 at her home, in Vicente López, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, after suffering from breast cancer.
