María Kodama

Who is María Kodama?

María Kodama Schweitzer is the widow of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and sole owner of his estate after his death in 1986. Borges had bequeathed to Kodama his rights as author in a will written in 1979, when she was his literary secretary, and bequeathed to her his whole estate in 1985. They were married in 1986, shortly before the death of Borges.

Kodama is the daughter of a Japanese father and a German mother. She met Borges when she was a student, at one of his lectures in Buenos Aires on Icelandic literature.

After the death in 1975 of Borges's ninety-nine-year-old mother, with whom he had lived all his life, Kodama became Borges’s literary secretary and had the opportunity—at the invitation of Borges's caretaker, "Fanny"—to assist him as a blind old man in his frequent travels abroad during his later years, when he received many invitations by institutions from around the world. Kodama helped Borges write, as he had lost his sight. She collaborated with him in Breve antología anglosajona and Atlas and in the translation of the Younger Edda by Snorri Sturluson.

Kodama married Borges through representatives in a civil proceeding in Paraguay on April 26, 1986.