Maria Kodama, widow of renowned Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, died Sunday in Buenos Aires at the age of 86 due to complications from cancer, her family said in a press release.

She was a writer, translator, co-author and sole custodian of the work of Borges, considered by literary critics to be one of the most important poets, essayists and novelists of his time.

The celebrated author of The Book of Fictional Creatures also died at the age of 86 in June 1986 in Geneva, Switzerland, two months after he married Maria Kodama.

Her passion for literature never waned. Despite her illness, she wrote the final work entitled La divisa punzo (without translation), in which, in collaboration with Claudia Farias Gomez, she tells the story of the controversial 19th century Argentine politician Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Her relationship with Borges began when they discovered they shared a love: English, old Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic…

She met him when she was still 16 years old and she was studying literature. Her father took her to listen to the author’s lecture.

“I miss Borges and how we had fun. My friends told me: “Dating a man from the labyrinths (ss a frequent image in the works of Borges) is scary.” But he was a cheerful person, and his labyrinths fascinated me. I spent time with him. I’m not a masochist, he was cute,” she said at an event in Guadalajara, Mexico.

About their relationship, Maria Kodama said without hesitation, “I never got the impression that he was dominating me or that I was inferior.”

At a time when Borges was considered the annual favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Maria Kodama remembered “everyone stopping him in the street and saying, ‘I hope you win it.’

He was never awarded.

The wife of the author of such works as “Fiction”, “The Book of Sand”, “Aleph” or even “The Brody Report”, created the José Luis Borges Foundation in 1988.

Source: RES-IPE