The Woman Behind Borges
María Kodama’s fierce loyalty transformed the legacy of Argentina’s most-cherished author.
AUGUST 1, 2023
Among the anecdotes that circulated this spring after the death of María Kodama, Jorge Luis Borges’ wife and literary executor, was a story about a meeting at the home of writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo. Borges had gone to use the toilet; Ocampo was in the kitchen. Bioy Casares then supposedly took advantage of the moment to ask Kodama if he could photograph her, since she had “an ideal face.”
The phrase was coarse, an objectification, but Kodama’s photogenic quality was undeniable. In almost every picture of her, she appears next to her employer and future husband, Borges. He was photogenic in a very different sense, almost always holding his walking stick, with his typical facial expression of a daydreamer (is he in a metaphysical trance or just distracted?). Kodama’s arm is sometimes linked with his. In some cases, he clings on to her with a firmness that might seem disturbing if it weren’t for the fact that he was blind and might have needed the support.
There isn’t much mystery in these photos. Kodama’s face doesn’t suggest an enigma, as is often the case with especially photogenic faces (Clarice Lispector’s, Susan Sontag’s, Bob Dylan’s). The photos of her with Borges are variations on the same theme: the trapped genius, too cerebral for this earthly world, guided with condescending tenderness by his future wife, now brooding, now looking happier, but always conveying a sense of practicality. For decades, Kodama was Borges’ literary secretary. And this, in broad strokes, is probably the image that will survive in the collective Argentine psyche — not so much the image of a spouse as of a neurotic assistant: someone viscerally loyal to the author, whose conviction that she was the only one who knew how to organize his papers the way he wanted led her to make profound errors.
The first time I met her, for an interview at the end of 2012 in Buenos Aires, she was wearing a blazer and lavender scarf. I remember the bones that protruded from her face and her austere air, difficult to define. She had arranged the meeting in a teahouse in Recoleta, a wealthy neighborhood in the capital, and the confident gesture of the waiter who pointed me toward the table (he seemed to know who I was going to meet) gave me the impression she was a frequent visitor. Maybe it was a cloistered, familiar place she considered a sure bet for interviews.
Everyone approached her only to talk about Borges, and she offered up her neck to them, assuming medium-like airs, trying to extend her powers of representation beyond her legal role.
During this period, she was submerged in one of her many legal imbroglios. The Argentine author Pablo Katchadjian had published El Aleph engordado (The fattened Aleph), an experimental book that used the original text of the famous story by Borges — “The Aleph” — and “fattened” it with other phrases and interventions by Katchadjian himself. In 2011, Kodama filed a lawsuit accusing Katchadjian of plagiarism. About a year later, the case still dragged on (it would last nearly a decade) and I reported on it for piauí, the Brazilian magazine where I currently work as a literary editor, interviewing both Katchadjian and Kodama, as well as several other people involved in the case. That first time I met with Kodama, she spoke of the case with irritation, but in general our conversation took on a more convivial tone. Her minimalist aesthetic contrasted with the animation of her conversation, full of anecdotes, strange coincidences and faits divers of all kinds. She told me how she’d studied Anglo-Saxon and the Icelandic sagas with Borges, and how they’d taken Arabic lessons together at the end of his life, in Lausanne, Switzerland. She said the only time she saw him truly angry was when his mother once mentioned the name of Juan Perón, the Argentine general and president, which he didn’t like to hear out loud. And she spoke of what she’d felt when she was still a girl and heard Borges’ “Two English Poems” recited by a private tutor.
While I interviewed Kodama, I took joy in the richness of the material she provided, and at the same time asked myself why, decades after Borges’ death, she was still happy to talk to the press, that butcher of reputations. Journalists play a morally dubious game when interviewing family members or close friends of very famous people. Sometimes it’s necessary to point out that the people being interviewed are interested in themselves, if not as protagonists, then at least as crucial supporters. With Kodama there was no need to do so. Everyone approached her only to talk about Borges, and she offered up her neck to them, assuming medium-like airs, trying to extend her powers of representation beyond her legal role.
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Kodama died in Buenos Aires on March 26, of breast cancer. Just like Borges, she died when she was 86 years old, the kind of coincidence she probably would have appreciated. She spent her final years in Loi Suites, a luxurious hotel situated on Vicente López street, in the same neighborhood where I met her. Born in Buenos Aires in 1937, the daughter of a Japanese chemist and a pianist of German descent, she studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Around that period, in the 1960s, she met Borges, though she’d seen him give a talk when she was 12 years old. In 1986, after a very long professional relationship that included literary collaborations, the two got married. (To avoid Argentina’s legal prohibition against divorce — Borges had a brief previous marriage to Elsa Astete Millán — the proceedings took place in Paraguay.) Two months later, in Geneva, Borges died of liver cancer and a pulmonary emphysema, and Kodama became his sole heir.
The most important part of the phrase — which appears in capital letters on the foundation’s website — is “correct interpretation,” underscoring Kodama’s belief that there is a unique key to understanding the work of Borges, and that as sole heir, she had this key.
She lived in Buenos Aires but often spent periods in Geneva and Paris — a fact that, along with her death in a place as impersonal as a five-star hotel, reinforces my impression (a superficial one, naturally) of a peripatetic person, a kind of workaholic focused only on the obsessive administration of her dead spouse’s estate for almost four decades. I often recall the primary objectives of the International Jorge Luis Borges Foundation, which she founded in 1988, two years after his death: “to disseminate the work of Jorge Luis Borges, contribute to its knowledge and promote its correct interpretation.” The most important part of the phrase — which appears in capital letters on the foundation’s website — is “correct interpretation,” underscoring Kodama’s belief that there is a unique key to understanding the work of Borges, and that as sole heir, she had this key.
It was a belief Kodama held until her final days. Just two weeks before her death, I tried to negotiate rights for the publication of an article in piauí. The piece, which had been written by an Argentine fiction writer and critic, dissected the literary relationship between Borges and Bioy Casares. The plan was to publish this essay alongside an article by Borges and Bioy Casares, but Kodama made negotiations difficult. Through her literary agents, she made it known that she would not grant the rights to Borges’ text if the critical essay were published alongside it. The text, to put it bluntly, was suppressed. Bioy Casares was one of Borges’ best friends and his main literary partner. They co-authored many pieces together, some under the pseudonym Honorio Bustos Domecq. Kodama’s dislike of Bioy Casares is well known in Argentina: She accused him of having asked for her number and of coming on to her during the episode when he asked to photograph her. But in this case, Kodama also had a more specific fear: She didn’t like that the critical essay mentioned Bioy Casares’ book Borges. In this diary, over a thousand pages long, Bioy Casares tells of his meetings with Borges over many decades, with notes about what he said during family meals and their writing sessions together. Bioy Casares shows the mythical Borges in more everyday circumstances.
Kodama’s dislike of Bioy Casares’ Borges can be read not only as a dislike of the diary itself but as part of a broader desire to monopolize Borges. Bolstering herself with legal arguments and frequently citing the word “responsibility” (as the designated heir), she always seemed haunted by the notion that Borges’ work was being distorted and read by others in what she saw as an erroneous way. Bioy Casares was the original heretic, but the argument Kodama used against him — that he was a talentless freeloader who wanted to surf Borges’ wave — was also the one she used against nearly all those she sued or threatened to sue, like Katchadjian. It doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind that the same argument could be used against her. Even though she wrote books of her own, the ones most likely to be remembered are her collaborations with Borges: the Breve antología Anglosajona (Brief Anglo-Saxon anthology) and Atlas, a collection of travel stories written by him and accompanied by photos she took.
Bioy Casares’ Borges is too down to earth; maybe Kodama yearned for the existence of only one, more idealized Borges, the “Borges of Kodama.” This is what led to her mysticism, the way she carried herself as a medium, as if she had a direct channel to the dead genius. It’s easy to joke about that aspect of her personality, but the press was an accomplice in its creation. I still remember the thrill I felt when she told me an anecdote about her travels with Borges to a conference in the Midwestern United States. He jotted down a poem called “Ein Traum” (A dream) in his notebook; he said Franz Kafka had visited him in his dream and dictated the lines to him, and the author of the poem was thus the Czech writer.
Kodama’s project of literary conservation has a comic aspect to it. It’s ironic, for instance, that the institution she founded and presided over was inaugurated in 1988, the year the theoretical concept of the “death of the author” spread through academic departments and literary magazines around the world. More ironic still is the fact that Borges was one of the idols many intellectuals associated with that strain of postmodernism. (Michel Foucault, for example, attributed to the Argentine author his impulse to write The Order of Things.) Kodama attempted to make unitary and indivisible the work of an author known for his interest in multiplicity, an omnivorous reader obsessed with doubles who drank from the fountain of past texts and saw beauty in borrowing from the classics. During the legal process against Katchadjian for plagiarism, some writers — among them the essayist Beatriz Sarlo and fiction writer César Aira — were suggested as possible witnesses to go to court and explain literary experimentation and intertextuality to the judge overseeing the case. (Ultimately, this wasn’t necessary.) In court, Katchadjian’s lawyer, the writer Ricardo Strafacce, used the example of Borges himself as one of the main inspirations for Katchadjian’s intertextual exercise.
As Kodama got older, one of the great questions in the Argentine press became who would assume the role of heir. Kodama spoke little on the subject, remaining evasive.
This absurd comedy is intoxicating, and would be possible to read as another Borgesian fiction, but Kodama’s litigious impulse has had severe human costs. Her project was indefensible and retrograde — ultimately conservative rather than conservationist. Last year, after an interval of almost a decade, I wrote again to Katchadjian. The legal dispute between him and Kodama was still ongoing, and I wanted to sound him out for another interview. He politely refused — an understandable gesture, given the epic extension of the trial he saw himself facing. In 2015, a judge who had initially absolved him reversed the decision, blocking his assets and preventing him from leaving the country. The same year, partly due to that decision, Katchadjian’s supporters protested at the National Library, in Buenos Aires, an institution Borges had once led, and over 3,000 local writers signed an open letter asking for a revision of the country’s intellectual property laws. The embargo of Katchadjian’s assets was overturned after an appeal; the country’s intellectual property laws remain largely the same. In 2017, after much back-and-forth — at one point, Katchadjian ran the risk of being imprisoned for six years — the courts absolved the author. In July 2021, his lawyer, Strafacce, requested that the rights of Borges’ stories be used to pay his legal fees until procedural expenses were paid. Kodama’s lawyer, Fernando Soto, considered the gesture ridiculous and said he and Kodama would likely try to resuscitate the case through civil action.
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The second time I met Kodama, also in 2012, I felt her fanatical, indefatigable side. Before the interview, Buenos Aires had been taken over by one of those torrential rains that sometimes assault the city, provoking energy cuts that last for hours, emptying the long flat avenues and giving the streets a deserted, slightly timeless aspect. I thought she would cancel the interview, but we ended up meeting in a dark, empty bar, also in Recoleta, where she spoke with more exasperation and a shine in her eyes about the legal cases she’d initiated over the course of her life. In 1986, just after Borges’ funeral, literary agents approached Kodama in Geneva and offered to represent his estate. Aurora Bernárdez, the ex-wife and literary executor of Julio Cortázar, pointed her toward Carmen Balcells, the famous Catalan agent of authors of the Latin American “boom” such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Kodama liked Balcells but told me she’d held off on contracting her because of her political orientation. Balcells was a communist, and Borges, who was a notorious conservative and anti-Peronist, would never have accepted the management of his inheritance by someone on the left, according to Kodama. Again with Bernárdez’s help, she then went to New York to meet Andrew Wylie, head of one of the best literary agencies in the world. Wylie was one of the few agents who hadn’t gone to Geneva to disturb her, a gesture Kodama interpreted as respect for her mourning. She signed the papers with him, and he still appears to be the agent responsible for the work of Borges.
With Wylie’s help, Kodama renegotiated contracts and rapidly went on to shape a new administration of Borges’ work, one more aggressive and financially efficient. One of her first notorious legal cases was a dispute that began in 1986, when she attempted to renegotiate royalties with North American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, a friend of Borges for many years and until then responsible for his translations into English. When alive, Borges had agreed to divide the royalties of editions in English between himself and his translator in an even 50-50 split, an agreement Kodama considered abusive. Kodama dismissed him, in a manner of speaking, and called on a new translator, Andrew Hurley.
The paradox, however, is that nobody did more to contribute to Borges kitsch than she did. The “Borges of Kodama,” in the end, is the one of amusing anecdotes and erudition for its own sake.
As Kodama got older, one of the great questions in the Argentine press became who would assume the role of heir. Kodama spoke little on the subject, remaining evasive. At one point, she said she would leave the work with two universities where Borges had given lectures, one North American and the other Japanese, but she refused to say which universities they would be. In a 2019 interview with La Nación, a journalist asked her if she was afraid of what would happen with Borges’ work when she died. “No,” said Kodama, “because the next person is going to be even worse than me … I already decided some time ago who that will be, and they are even more strict.”
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Kodama managed to unite almost the entire Argentine literary scene, not particularly well known for its sense of collective action or its absence of egos, in opposition to her ironclad administration of the Borges estate. The statements in her favor since her death have focused on the misogyny she suffered. “Before emphasizing her errors, it’s worth asking why other heirs are not questioned, some of whom are capricious and very conflicted about the work they’re responsible for,” said writer and journalist Miriam Molero. A generous reading of Kodama’s legacy would perhaps give her credit for having prevented a certain mercantile banalization of Borges, since it would be easy to see the face of the writer stamped on tote bags and mugs all over the world, transformed into a kind of literary Albert Einstein. The paradox, however, is that nobody did more to contribute to Borges kitsch than she did. The “Borges of Kodama,” in the end, is the one of amusing anecdotes and erudition for its own sake. Kodama’s stories and soundbites about Borges seemed pre-packed for the press, ready to be used in journalistic leads (something I myself took advantage of). And she surrendered her own life to the author, or at least to that image of him.
But Kodama was not the only fetishist. In a different way, and for all they negate it, the Argentine vanguard and experimentalists were, too — whatever those labels refer to today. They didn’t desacralize the author; he remains sanctified, untouchable. Beatriz Sarlo said once that Borges “is stronger than Argentine literature, and more suggestive than the cultural tradition that he belongs to.” The phrase isn’t trivial; one cannot say of Machado de Assis that he is stronger than Brazilian literature, or that Tolstoy is stronger than Russian literature.
Eight days after Kodama’s death, Soto, her lawyer, submitted a petition asking the Argentine courts to begin the succession paperwork for the Borges estate, with the aim of identifying possible natural inheritors. According to him, Kodama hadn’t left a will, and if no family members presented themselves, the inventory would be declared “unresolved.” Borges’ work would have then come under the guardianship of the municipal government of Buenos Aires. The absence of a will was treated as a surprise, but in fact it should not have been — obsessive administrators rarely consider themselves replaceable. Some were suspicious of Soto’s haste. If the inheritance were declared unresolved, he would have the right to 10 percent of the assets, at least in theory. He argued that he only wanted to accelerate the presentation of possible heirs so that the inheritance wouldn’t remain in the hands of the state.
On the morning of April 4, just a day after Soto’s petition, five nieces and nephews — Mariana, Martín, Matías, María Belén and María Victoria, all children of the sole and now-deceased brother of the most famous widow in Argentina — came forward to make their claim. As the press waited on a judicial decision, there was much speculation about whether these relatives who apparently had had little contact with their aunt should be granted such powers. Beatriz Sarlo argued for a “Borges archive” under the oversight of the country’s national library. Taking a similar stance, novelist and critic Carlos Gamerro stated that while the potential economic benefits of the relatives should be respected, the management of such an important literary legacy should perhaps be handled by a panel of experts and academics chosen by the International Jorge Luis Borges Foundation. Sarlo’s and Gamerro’s statements captured a fear that might have been shared by other writers who felt that Kodama, throughout her lifetime, usurped a national patrimony — a public good — and made it private. But these statements were to no effect. On June 27, a civil court of the city of Buenos Aires ruled that Kodama’s nephews and nieces are the rightful heirs, and they will now be responsible for managing the estate of Argentina’s most cherished writer.
This is an edited translation of an article originally published in the Brazilian magazine Revista Piauí.
PHOTO: María Kodama en la inauguración de la sede del Museo Nacional de Arte Oriental. Fotos Kaloian/Ministerio de de Cultura de la Nación. December 8 2022. (via Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)