Ms. Kodama was a writer, translator, collaborator and sole legatee of Borges' work, considered by literary critics to be one of the greatest poets, essayists and short story writers of her time.
The famous author of "Fictions" also died at the age of 86, in June 1986, in the Swiss city of Geneva, two months after marrying Mrs. Kodama.
His passion for literature has never wavered. Even ill, she was able to write her latest book, "La divisa punzo" (not translated), in which she traces the story of the controversial nineteenth-century Argentine statesman Juan Manuel de Rosas, in collaboration with the writer Claudia Farias Gomez.
His relationship with Borges began when they discovered a shared love for the English language, Old Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic.
She met him when she was only 16 years old and a literature student. Her father had taken her to listen to a lecture by the author.
"I miss Borges, as well as the way we had fun. My friends used to tell me: +Going out with the old man from the labyrinths (a frequent image in Borges' works), it's scary+. But come and meet him: he's a hilarious person and labyrinths fascinate me. I had a great time with him. I'm not a masochist, he was a very kind person," she said at a conference at the Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.
His definition of their bond is blunt: "I never felt that man dominated me or that I was inferior.
From the days when Borges was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year, Kodama remembers that "everyone stopped him in the street and said: +I hope you will win it+". The prize was never awarded.
The inseparable companion of the author of "Fictions", "The Book of Sand", "The Aleph" or "The Brodie Report" created, in 1988, the Jorge Luis Borges Foundation.
© 2023 AFP