María Kodama, Keeper of the Borges Legacy, Dies at 86

María Kodama, a author and translator who was finest recognized for guarding the legacy of her husband, the masterly Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, died on March 26 within the Buenos Aires suburb Vicente López. She was 86.

Fernando Soto, her lawyer, introduced her dying on Twitter. News accounts mentioned the trigger was breast most cancers.

For years Ms. Kodama was Mr. Borges’s secretary, aide and touring companion. A couple of months earlier than he died in 1986, they married. Mr. Borges bequeathed the rights to his works to Ms. Kodama, and shortly after his dying she established the Jorge Luis Borges International Foundation to additional the appreciation of his writing and shield it from what she seen as misappropriation and misinterpretation.

In the times since Ms. Kodama’s dying, news accounts have mentioned that she apparently left no will and that the standing of the Borges property was in limbo.

“She didn’t like to talk about those issues,” Mr. Soto informed The Associated Press. “She didn’t talk about her death.”

In life, Ms. Kodama was dedicated to Mr. Borges, one of many towering figures of Twentieth-century Latin American literature. Mr. Borges was some 38 years older than her, and by the point she started working for and with him, he had misplaced his eyesight.

“She would read to him, and he fell in love with her voice,” Andrew Wylie, her literary agent in New York, mentioned in a cellphone interview, “which was something that you could easily imagine him doing, because her voice was very particular and interesting and lovely.”

It was a relationship that started, in a way, when Ms. Kodama was a baby. She was born on March 10, 1937, in Buenos Aires. Her father, Yosaburo, was Japanese, and her mom, María Antonia Schweizer, was an Argentine German. Her dad and mom separated when she was younger, and he or she was “brought up between two cultures,” as she put it in a 2016 interview for the Australian publication The Sydney Review of Books.

At a presentation recorded by the Library of Congress in 2017, Ms. Kodama mentioned that she first encountered Mr. Borges’s work as a 5-year-old when a girl who was tutoring her in English learn her two of his poems. They had been written, in English, to a girl he was concerned about on the time.

“He offers her his solitude, his sadness, his failure and ‘the hunger of my heart,’” she informed The Sydney Review. “When she translated this for me, I asked her, ‘What is hunger of the heart?’ because obviously for a 5-year-old child, hunger is only the need to eat. She told me I would understand when I grew up.”

When she was 12, she was taken to a lecture he gave. A couple of years later, now a budding scholar, she bumped into him at a bookstore in Buenos Aires. She informed him she had heard him converse when she was a lady; he invited her to hitch a examine group he was main on Anglo-Saxon literature.

Ms. Kodama studied literature on the University of Buenos Aires, the place Mr. Borges was a professor. By the late Nineteen Sixties, she was appearing as his assistant.

Biographers have lengthy speculated in regards to the nature of their relationship, however there isn’t any doubt that she learn to him, took his dictation, ultimately traveled with him and on some works was primarily his collaborator — as an illustration, his “Atlas” (1984) was a group of essays and tales based mostly on their travels collectively.

The years after Mr. Borges’s dying have been usually contentious ones for Ms. Kodama. She did some writing of her personal, together with publishing “Homage to Borges,” a 2016 assortment of lectures she had given about him. But a lot of her time was consumed with combating authorized challenges and bringing some herself over rights, translations and different points.

“I’ve been through 30 years of hell,” she mentioned within the interview with The Sydney Review. “I have been defamed.”

Scholars and others complained about her dealing with of Mr. Borges’s archive and her view of his legacy. One controversy discovered its solution to a Manhattan theater, the place in 1987 the choreographer and director Graciela Daniele offered a piece referred to as “Tango Apasionado” based mostly on a few of Mr. Borges’s writings.

The present was properly acquired — Mel Gussow, reviewing it for The New York Times, referred to as it “a music-theater-dance piece of breathtaking intensity” — and it appeared headed for an prolonged Off Broadway run and tour. Ms. Kodama had authorized the unique run, however as soon as she noticed the present, she refused permission for an extension with out important modifications to the dialogue.

Those modifications, Ms. Daniele informed The Times, “would not have been the piece we created.” (She and her collaborator, Jim Lewis, later created a distinct model of the present with out the Borges materials.)

Whatever the controversies, Mr. Wylie mentioned that Ms. Kodama and Mr. Borges had been a great match.

“She was a lovely and brilliant complement to his genius,” he mentioned, “which was considerable.”

She leaves no rapid survivors.