Maria Kodama, widow of Borges and curator of his work has not left a will – Corriere.it

Maria Kodamawidow of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who died on March 26, left no will. This was announced, as reported by the Argentine press, by the lawyer Fernando Soto, the lawyer who defended the author’s widow in her numerous lawsuits. Soto initiated a request to the Buenos Aires judiciary to declare the estate vacant: it includes at least two houses, a palace and above all the archive with Borges’ manuscripts. The lawyer hopes the court will soon appoint a curator for the rights to Borges’ works and for the assets of the Borges International Foundation, which Kodama chaired from 1988 until his death.

For a long time the great author of thealeph, almost completely blind, Kodama said
the world, bypassing the darkness and the 38 years of difference. Kodama was born as Mara Kodama-Schweizer in Buenos Aires on March 10, 1937, to a Japanese father, the architect Yosaburo Kodama, and a German mother. She was herself a pupil of the writer, whom she had first met at 16 and, in 1975, became not only her personal assistant, but also her eyes.

The marriage with Borges took place by proxy in Paraguay on April 26, 1986, two months before the writer’s disappearance in Geneva. The considerable difference in age between them and the tenacity with which she shielded her husband, the numerous legal disputes she faced in the publishing world, have contributed to fueling the critical judgments on her behalf. From that shadow that she had followed him throughout her life he defended himself in an autobiography written together with the journalist Mario Mactas: it was Borges who had insisted on getting married and named her her only heir.

Kodama has always insisted on having the final say on her husband’s rights. In recent years he had claimed to have an agreement to transfer his assets to two universities, one in the United States and the other in Japan, but he had not put it in writing and therefore it cannot proceed.

Maria didn’t like to talk about her illnesses, her death was a topic she didn’t want to deal with – Soto told reporters summoned to his office -. He wanted Borges’ work to be adequately defended; he hoped that foreign universities would intervene to guarantee the objectivity of the treatment towards Borges which in Argentina, due to the political and ideological environment, he had not received.