\u00ab\u00a0Borges: une vie de po\u00e9sie<\/b>\u00a0\u00bb (63mm),\u00a07\u00e8me film d’Arrabal,<\/b> est le testament culturel et le message proph\u00e9tique du po\u00e8te.<\/p>\n
[Collaboration inoubliable d’Armando Verdiglione<\/b>].<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
MAR\u00cdA KODAMA – JAMES HALFORD,\u00a0 11 October, 2016<\/p>\n
Such Loneliness in that Gold\u00a0<\/b> (Mar\u00eda Kodama on Life After Borges)<\/p>\n
James Halford is a recipient of a 2016 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the first of three essays by Halford that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other fellowship recipients, Ali Jane Smith and Ben Brooker.<\/p>\n
In 1976, Jorge Luis Borges dedicated a poem called \u2018The Moon\u2019 to Mar\u00eda Kodama, a shy, beautiful, Japanese-Argentine woman, 37 years his junior:<\/p>\n
There is such loneliness in that gold.
\nThe moon of the nights is not the moon
\nWhom the first Adam saw. The long centuries
\nOf human vigil have filled her
\nWith ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.
\nTheir story is well-known in Argentina. They met in 1953 in a bookstore on the calle Florida in downtown Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n
\u2018Excuse me. I heard you give a lecture when I was little girl.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Ah, did you? And now you\u2019re all grown up?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018No, I\u2019m in high school. In my fourth year.\u2019<\/p>\n
She was sixteen and he was 54 \u2013 already famous in Argentina, but not yet abroad. He was about to lose what was left of his sight. \u2018He only saw light and shadow. But from my voice he would have known I was very young.\u2019 Borges invited Kodama to join his Saturday morning Anglo-Saxon study group at the National Library, where he was director.<\/p>\n
\u2018Old English? Like Shakespeare?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018No, much older. Tenth century.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018It must be very difficult.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Yes, but I don\u2019t know it either. I am proposing that we study it together.\u2019<\/p>\n
They married in 1986, two months before he died.<\/p>\n
I met Mar\u00eda Kodama at the Caf\u00e9 Persicco in the upscale Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Recoleta on a grey Sunday morning in May. Outside, the avenida Corrientes was slick from the previous night\u2019s storm, still strewn with yellow and orange leaves. A homeless man playing chess at the table by the entrance was shouting at his invisible opponent. As Kodama pushed through the glass doors, looking for me, I felt a surge of nervousness. We\u2019d arranged to meet earlier in the day, but had rescheduled because of a mix up about the location. She could be prickly, my Argentine friends had warned. \u2018You\u2019re meeting the FIFA of Argentine literature,\u2019 one young Buenos Aires poet said: \u2018Watch out she doesn\u2019t sue you.\u2019<\/p>\n
She was a slender woman, a little shorter than I expected. Smartly but simply dressed in a cream-coloured jacket and grey scarf, she wore a silver bangle on her right wrist, and large, square rings on the first and third fingers of her left hand. Though the Argentine press delight in printing unflattering photographs of her, Kodama, who is 79, never wears make up. As in nearly all the pictures I\u2019d seen, she wore light colours \u2013 a carefully considered choice, I suspect, from someone well aware the word \u2018widow,\u2019 will appear prominently beneath every image. She smiled as I rose to greet her. When she kissed my cheek, I forgot in my relief, to call her se\u00f1ora:<\/p>\n
\u2018Mar\u00eda, perd\u00f3n. I\u2019m sorry for the confusion. I\u2019m an academic not a journalist.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018No te preocupes. Don\u2019t worry. It\u2019s better you\u2019re not a journalist.<\/p>\n
The Persicco is a noisy, modern place with white and yellow checked tiles and shiny brass fixtures. Some of the other customers stared at her, whispering among themselves, as we sat down together. Kodama gave me the best part of three hours of her time, describing her life with Borges and discussing his work. Her generosity and warmth were at odds with everything I\u2019d ever read or heard about her.<\/p>\n
Relatively little is known about Mar\u00eda Kodama\u2019s early life. Her father, Yosaburo Kodama, was born in Japan in 1905, and was raised by his grandmother, his only relative. When she died, he left his homeland for good. Kodama doesn\u2019t know the exact year of his departure or his reasons for emigrating. He was one of thousands of young Japanese who left for the Americas between the 1868 Meiji restoration and the second world war. Better economic prospects and avoiding conscription into the imperial military were common motives. As restrictions on Japanese immigration were introduced in the North, increasing numbers settled in Latin America.<\/p>\n
Yosaburo planned to go to the US, with a stopover in Argentina to visit a friend of a friend. But in Buenos Aires, he met and fell in love with a 17-year-old Argentine-German pianist named Mar\u00eda Antonia Schweizer. Kodama says Mar\u00eda saw Yosabura as \u2018an exotic prince from faraway lands\u2019. He was nine years older than her. Though he soon found work with a pharmaceutical company in Buenos Aires, the marriage was unhappy, and the couple separated when their daughter was only three years old. Mar\u00eda Kodama won\u2019t talk about her brother, Jorge: \u2018Let\u2019s just say I\u2019m an only child.\u2019<\/p>\n
Born on 10 March, 1937, Kodama grew into a shy, solitary girl, with few friends of her own age, and certainly no boyfriends. She lived with her staunchly Catholic mother and grandmother, but spent weekends with her Japanese father: \u2018I was brought up between two cultures. My grandmother was all about God, the Fatherland, and the family home; my father was a Shintoist. One would say white and the other would say black\u2026 I had to choose or I would have gone mad.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kodama chose Japan. Until she met Borges, Yosaburo Kodama was the most important person in her life. Kodama remembers him teaching her the basics of the Japanese language, and telling her stories of the country\u2019s history and culture. He also contributed to her aesthetic education: \u2018My father liked art very much. From a very young age, he gave me books of paintings and took me to exhibitions.\u2019 On one of their weekend excursions she asked him to define beauty. The next week, by way of answer, he gave her an art book containing an image of a sculpture in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.<\/p>\n
\u2018But it doesn\u2019t have a head.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Who told you that beauty is about the head? Look at the folds of the tunic. They\u2019re being blown by the wind off the sea. To capture the sea breeze for eternity, that\u2019s beauty.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kodama told me she was drawn to Borges because his ethical and aesthetic outlook reminded her of her father. \u2018Borges always joked that my father had educated me for him, because thanks to all that training in my younger days, I could later describe for him the reality he could no longer see.\u2019 The two men met on several occasions, but were not close.<\/p>\n
Kodama has told the story of her first encounter with Borges\u2019s writing in dozens of interview and public speeches. When she was five years old her private English tutor read her Borges\u2019s \u2018Two English Poems,\u2019 which were dedicated to Beatriz Bibiloni de Webster, one of many respectable Buenos Aires society ladies he unsuccessfully courted in the 1930s. She repeated this favourite anecdote to me at the Caf\u00e9 Persicco:<\/p>\n
\u2018In these poems, which are in English because it was the language he spoke with that se\u00f1ora, he lists all the things he can offer her, and they are the opposite of what one might expect. He offers her his solitude, his sadness, his failure, and \u201cthe hunger of my heart\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 When she [the tutor] translated this for me, I asked her \u201cwhat is hunger of the heart?\u201d because obviously for a five-year-old child, hunger is only the need to eat. She told me I would understand when I grew up: \u201cThe hunger of my heart.\u201d\u2018
\nMar\u00eda Kodama has never remarried. She has dedicated her life to promoting Borges\u2019s work through the Foundation she runs in his name. I thought that by pushing her to talk a little less about him, and a little more about herself, I might steer her away from the official narrative. But I found her reluctant to emerge from his shadow.<\/p>\n
\u2018Can you describe an ordinary week in your life?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018I travel a good deal to talk about Borges\u2019s work overseas. When I am at home in Buenos Aires, I spend a lot of time at home reading. Many people ask me to comment on theses or academic studies about Borges.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018But for fun?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018I don\u2019t have a television set or an email account. I go to a live show nearly every night: music, theatre, or dance. Last night I saw the Shen Yun dance troupe from China. They are very interested in Borges in China nowadays. The complete works have been translated into Mandarin.\u2019<\/p>\n
Since her answers kept spiralling back to Borges, I tried another angle. I knew she had studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and had noticed she always made a point of being introduced in public as a writer, translator, and teacher, though most people know her as Borges\u2019s wife. So I asked her what she had written and whether any of her work had been published. She laughed:<\/p>\n
\u2018I have never published anything because I am always writing prologues for other people\u2019s books. I write for pleasure. Borges adored the short stories I used to write and wanted me to publish them. He wanted to write the prologue, but I never let him do that.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kodama didn\u2019t even mention her forthcoming book, which was published a few months after we spoke. Homenaje a Borges (Homage to Borges) is a collection of twenty, serious-minded lectures about Borges\u2019s work that Kodama has delivered at various universities around the world since his death. Its one unguarded moment is the dedication: \u2018To Borges, my love for ever and ever and a day.\u2019 The only piece of creative writing I managed to find published in her name was a brief memoir that appeared in the New York Times in 2011, in which she described the view from her apartment. Her window looks onto Borges\u2019s old library, a building full of \u2018books once touched by his hands.\u2019<\/p>\n
By the late 1960s, the bond between Borges and Kodama had evolved beyond friendship. The biographies are unanimous that it lacked any physical dimension; I was too polite to ask. Aside from their regular language studies, they took to meeting at the confiter\u00eda La Fragata and at his home, where she would assist him with translations, transcribe new work, and read aloud for him from his favourite books. In those years, Kodama studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where Borges was a professor, and she earned a living teaching Spanish to Japanese businessmen. She had worked hard to establish financial independence from her family, who disapproved of the professor\u2019s frequent telephone calls and gifts of books. It was Borges, blind and unmarried in his sixties, who continued to live with his mother. Under the watchful eye of Leonora Acevedo de Borges, the professor and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 exercised an almost Victorian level of propriety in the decade of free love. Kodama dressed modestly in white blouses and plaid skirts, and the two always addressed each other with the formal \u2018usted,\u2019 in place of the familiar \u2018tu.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018She liked me, and we respected each other,\u2019 Kodama says of Do\u00f1a Leonora. For most of Borges\u2019s adult life, the writer\u2019s mother acted as his carer, literary secretary, and travelling companion. As Do\u00f1a Leonora\u2019s health declined and her son\u2019s fame increased, the bachelor sought a wife. Between 1967 and 1970, during Borges\u2019s short-lived, unhappy first marriage to Elsa Astete Millan \u2013 a widow, and an old flame from the 1940s \u2013 Kodama was apparently the only woman allowed to visit him at home. She was considered too young to be a threat.<\/p>\n
Around 1970, as Borges and Astete Millan were separating, Kodama ceased being his student, assistant, and companion and became his confidant, carer, collaborator, and muse. The writer moved back in with his aging mother, now bedbound and unable to speak, for the last three years of her life. According to the official version of the story, Do\u00f1a Leonora one day brought Kodama and Borges\u2019s hands together over her body.<\/p>\n
I was in Argentina to attend a two-week seminar at the National University of San Martin, and to visit the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. During a panel at the Book Fair, I heard Roberto Alifano and Alejandro Vaccaro, a couple of Borges\u2019s old acquaintances from the Argentine Society of Authors, give their view of Kodama: \u2018Mar\u00eda Kodama es alguien que vive de viuda,\u2019 said Alifano. \u2018Mar\u00eda Kodama is someone who earns a living as a widow.\u2019<\/p>\n
Kodama has had long battles with both these men in the Argentine courts and the media. \u2018Alifano is a rat,\u2019 Kodama told me across the table. She reserved her strongest criticism for her husband\u2019s best friend, Adolfo Bioy Casares, who spent much of the 1990s working on a 1600-page compilation of his diary entries about Borges from across their forty-year friendship \u2013 to be published only after both men were dead. The book infuriated Mar\u00eda Kodama when it finally appeared in 2006. \u2018Mar\u00eda was his love,\u2019 Bioy Casares admits, but he expresses doubts that Borges\u2019s feelings were reciprocated. He also says the writer \u2018lived in fear of making her angry.\u2019 Kodama is depicted as a jealous, dominating figure who isolated Borges from his old friends and may even have pressured him to remain in Europe at the end of his life rather than return home.<\/p>\n
Speaking to me, her anger focused on the book\u2019s alleged inaccuracy and its betrayal of trust: \u2018I ask you: if a man writes a book in which he invents and distorts your words, or puts words in your mouth he doesn\u2019t have the courage to say. And he publishes it after you\u2019ve both died (which is already an act of cowardice, because he doesn\u2019t want to take responsibility). If the two of you met in the next world, would you still think that man was your friend?\u2019<\/p>\n
I asked her to respond to a few other influential names linked with Borges, starting with the Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo, a friend in their university days, who has suggested in recent years that Borges\u2019s texts will never be properly edited while Kodama is alive: \u2018That is not an academic judgement, but a personal one that affects my work. I brought a lawsuit against her because we are academic colleagues, and she ought to know the damage that can be caused by unfounded words about someone.\u2019<\/p>\n
When I asked her view of leading American Borges scholar, Daniel Balderston, she zeroed in on the small fraction of his work that deals with queer themes in Borges\u2019s writing. \u2018Borges was not a homosexual.\u2019 Before I could mention any more names, she leaned confidentially across the table, lifting her fringe to show me her slightly swollen and discoloured right eyebrow. \u2018I keep my hair long to hide it.\u2019 Without naming the condition, she told me she has been living with chronic pain for some years, treating it with strong medication. As far as I know she hasn\u2019t discussed her ill health publicly. But she brought it up openly with me, knowing I was going to write about our meeting. Kodama insisted her health has not affected her work as director of the Borges Foundation, but admitted it has affected her sleep and her moods. She has said and done some things she regretted, and has lost many friends. About the court cases, however, she was unrepentant: \u2018I have been treated like the wicked witch for defending my husband\u2019s legacy\u2026 I gave Borges my word that I would take care of his work.\u2019 Her soft voice became steely: \u2018I have been through thirty years of hell. I have been defamed.\u2019<\/p>\n
In 1975, journalists photographed Borges weeping at his mother\u2019s funeral. His sonnet \u2018Remorse,\u2019 written two days later and published in the national newspaper, La Nacion, remains perhaps his most quoted work in Argentina:<\/p>\n
I have committed the worst sin of all
\nThat a man can commit. I have not been
\nHappy\u2026
\nMy parents bred and bore me for a higher
\nFaith in the human game\u2026
\nI let them down. I wasn\u2019t happy.
\nHe would later say to Kodama: \u2018please don\u2019t write anything two days after I die because it is bound to be sentimental and weepy and it will pursue you all your life.\u2019<\/p>\n
Mar\u00eda Kodama regularly points out that while Borges\u2019s complete works from 1923 to 1975 were dedicated to Do\u00f1a Leonora \u2013 \u2018mother, my very voice. Here we are the two of us, talking\u2019 \u2013 the texts of his final years, were written for her. From around 1973, she began to accompany him abroad on his lecture tours. Invitations from foreign universities, governments, and publishers flowed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Borges\u2019s lectures \u2013 delivered in a hesitant, stuttering style \u2013 became a significant new strand of his creative output after he lost his sight in 1955. With his blindness he found it impossible to write tightly plotted and densely allusive narratives like those found in the collections Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). Increasingly, he focused on poetry, short prose, and public lectures.<\/p>\n
Kodama and Borges\u2019s journeys together through the Americas, Western Europe, Egypt, Turkey, Iceland and Japan, are documented in Atlas (1984), a travel book pairing Borges\u2019s short texts with Kodama\u2019s photographs. In 2016, the Borges Foundation has put together a travelling exhibition of these photos to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Borges\u2019s death: Borges and Mar\u00eda Kodama placing incense at a Shinto shrine; in Mexican sombreros at the base of a Mayan pyramid; in the basket of a hot air balloon about to soar over the vineyards of the Napa Valley. During their travels, Kodama became his eyes. She discovered he had an enormous visual memory with very clear and detailed recollections of artworks he had seen in European museums as a teenager, and she took to describing the places they visited for his benefit. \u2018He would always remember a poem related to every place. It was a magical, marvellous relationship.\u2019<\/p>\n
In other ways, they were an unusual couple. The two never co-habited and always slept in separate hotel rooms when travelling. In the evenings, she would fold his clothes for the next day and leave them on the end of the bed. One Borges\u2019s poems from this period, \u2018El amenzado,\u2019 expresses a powerful fear of his own emotions and body.<\/p>\n
This is love. I shall have to hide or flee\u2026
\nA woman aches through the whole of my body.
\nKodama has repeatedly told journalists that Borges pestered her to marry him throughout the 1970s, but she always refused, citing the trauma of her parents\u2019 separation. She was fearful of being taken over by Borges\u2019s \u2018monstrous fame.\u2019 In 1979 \u2013 apparently without her knowledge \u2013 he made her the primary benefactor of his will. \u2018If I had known, I would have left him.\u2019<\/p>\n
When Borges was diagnosed with liver cancer in late 1984, he refused chemotherapy. To avoid media attention, he elected to keep his condition secret from everyone but Mar\u00eda Kodama and his doctor. Not even his sister or his old friend Bioy Casares were told. \u2018Borges told me he didn\u2019t want his death turned into a spectacle and his last breath sold on cassette tape,\u2019 Kodama confided. The writer revised the terms of his earlier will, again, Kodama says, without her knowledge. Borges\u2019s new will kept her as sole heir to his literary estate, but significantly reduced the cash payout to Fani Uveda, his live-in housekeeper of more than three decades, and the minor provisions made for his sister\u2019s children.<\/p>\n
On November 28, 1985, Borges and Kodama left Argentina for Europe, with permission from the writer\u2019s doctor. Kodama believed the purpose of the tour was to say their goodbyes in Italy and Switzerland. But when they arrived in Geneva, Borges said he wanted to stay. \u2018It was clear to me that he had decided this beforehand, when he learned that he was going to die.\u2019 In late December, the couple installed themselves in rooms 308 and 309 of the Hotel l\u2019Arbal\u00e8te. \u2018I am a free man,\u2019 Borges announced in a statement to the suspicious press. \u2018I have decided to stay in Geneva, because I associate Geneva with the happiest days of my life\u2019. He had lived in Switzerland with his family during the first world war. For him, it was a place that represented neutrality, privacy, and peace. \u2018The Confederates,\u2019 the final text in his final collection, takes the creation of the old Swiss confederacy in 1291 as a symbol of his hopes for a world order based on \u2018forgetting differences and accentuating affinities\u2019. In Geneva, according to Kodama, Borges continued to pressure her on the question of marriage. They had kept their relationship secret for fifteen years and he wanted to acknowledge it publicly before he died. He asked his friend Franco Mar\u00eda Ricci, an Italian editor, to intervene: \u2018Franco, convince Mar\u00eda to marry me; I want to die knowing she\u2019s my wife.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Mar\u00eda, you\u2019ve been with him since you were young,\u2019 the editor said to Kodama. \u2018It\u2019s the only thing that will give him happiness.\u2019<\/p>\n
She insisted she was not prepared to become financially dependent on him and compromise her personal freedom. \u2018You are a prisoner of freedom,\u2019 Borges said. In March 1986 she finally relented. Borges ordered his Argentine lawyer to begin the process of seeking a marriage licence in Paraguay \u2013 a legal workaround that was necessary because he had separated from but never divorced his first wife. \u2018My marriage was like the legion of other marriages registered overseas when divorce was not possible in Argentina,\u2019 said Kodama. \u2018It was meant to be a secret between the two of us to make him happy.\u2019<\/p>\n
But in May the same year, shortly after the paperwork came through, the news leaked, and made headlines in Buenos Aires. Borges died peacefully in his sleep on Saturday June 14, with Kodama holding his hand. Argentina\u2019s most famous agnostic was buried a few plots from John Calvin in Geneva\u2019s Plainpalais cementery. It was not until after Borges was dead, Kodama says, that his lawyers at home called her in Switzerland and told her she was her husband\u2019s heir and literary executor.<\/p>\n
The period Kodama calls her \u2018thirty years of hell\u2019 began when Borges died. The writer had left his affairs in a mess. The new widow not only had to contend with the grievances of Borges\u2019s housekeeper, nephews, and the Argentine media, but also the unique editorial difficulties posed by a fragmented oeuvre consisting of hundreds of very short texts.<\/p>\n
First came challenges to the validity of the marriage and of Borges\u2019s final testament. Borges\u2019s housekeeper, Fani Uveda, and his three nephews, claimed Kodama had influenced the elderly writer to change his will. The Argentine courts, however, found that Borges entered willingly into the marriage, and that the union was not even necessary for Kodama to become the executor of his will. Her claim to the estate was upheld.<\/p>\n
The widow then embarked on a long series of legal battles of her own, aimed at consolidating her control over all author rights in all languages and combating attacks on her reputation. One target was the American translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with whom Borges had collaborated on some of the best English versions of his work, between 1967 and 1972.\u00a0 After the writer\u2019s death, the Borges and di Giovanni versions \u2013 for which the translator was receiving a generous fifty percent of royalties \u2013 were allowed to go out of print. In the 1990s, Viking\/Penguin commissioned new English versions of Borges\u2019s collected works in three hefty volumes. The collected non-fictions are a vital addition to the Borges corpus in English. But most reviewers, myself included, found the new translations of the poetry and fiction inferior to their predecessors. The Penguin\/Viking editions are now the most widely available version of Borges for English speakers. Kodama also succeeded in blocking di Giovanni from republishing the earlier translations online (though you can still find them if you know where to look). The best English translations of Borges still widely available are those in Yates and Irby\u2019s anthology, Labyrinths (New Directions: 1962, 2007) but the volume contains only a tiny fraction of his total output.<\/p>\n
Much of the odium directed toward Mar\u00eda Kodama over the years seems really to be aimed at Borges himself. The writer was far from universally admired in Argentina during his lifetime. His stance against the Peron regime, and his opposition to the Cuban revolution alienated the left, while his publicly voiced doubts about the Argentine people\u2019s readiness for democracy, and his support for military dictatorships at home and in Chile (later retracted) probably cost him the Nobel Prize. Borges\u2019s decision to die abroad only reinforced the image some of his countrymen have of him as a reactionary snob. Even today, everyone in Argentina has an opinion about Borges. \u2018Why are you foreigners so obsessed with Borges?\u2019 scolded the chatty manager of my hotel: \u2018He wasn\u2019t even an Argentine writer. He was a European writer.\u2019 Kodama has tried to combat this perception by emphasising the importance of the writer\u2019s hometown to his creative output during the commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of his death. \u2018Borges, like the ancient Greeks, belonged to his city\u2026 He was born in Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires was his very being.\u2019<\/p>\n
Borges\u2019s Buenos Aires, however, was the expanding port city of the 1880s and 1890s re-imaged from the vantage point of the 1920s and 1930s. It can be hard to find any trace of that city. The house at 994 on the calle Maipu, where the writer was born in 1899, is an apartment complex now, with a small commemorative plaque beside the door. Though the Palermo street where Borges spent most of his childhood, the old calle Serrano, has been renamed in his honour, the house where the family lived in those years \u2013 a few blocks south of the Plaza Italia \u2013 has been demolished and replaced by a rundown bar. The old national library in San Telmo, where Borges was director between 1955 and 1973, is in urgent need of renovation, though it still hosts the national institutes of contemporary dance and musicology. Meanwhile, the Borges Museum at 1660 on the calle Anchorena in the Recoleta, which doubles as the headquarters of Kodama\u2019s international foundation, has only a tenuous connection to the writer\u2019s life (Borges and his mother lived next door for a few years in the 1940s). One of Kodama\u2019s assistants told me that the Foundation has been trying to buy the adjacent building back from the neighbours for years: \u2018but the se\u00f1ora doesn\u2019t want to sell.\u2019<\/p>\n
The regionalist \u2018Borges of Buenos Aires\u2019 exists in tension with the cosmopolitan fabulist who is read around the world in dozens of languages. In 2016, in addition to the thirtieth anniversary celebrations in Argentina, Mar\u00eda Kodama has presided over similar commemorations in Switzerland, Spain, and New York. \u2018All of these events demonstrate that his work remains alive,\u2019 she says. The process of monumentalising Borges in brass, stone, and deluxe editions, now thirty years advanced, contrasts markedly with the writer\u2019s own sly prediction of his place in literary history. The epilogue to the original 1974 Emec\u00e9 edition of his Spanish, Obras Completas takes the form of an apocryphal 2074 encyclopedia entry. The \u2018author and autodidact\u2019: \u2018Jos\u00e9 Borges,\u2019 we are told, is mainly remembered for never having written a novel.<\/p>\n
Among scholars, the most serious complaint about the way the Foundation has managed the writer\u2019s legacy is that there is no proper critical edition of Borges in his own language. I asked Kodama whether such an edition will ever appear. \u2018I have heard that question many times and I ask you who is the person capable of editing a critical edition of Borges? I am willing to review people\u2019s qualifications.\u2019 Ultimately, Kodama says, she does not know of anyone she would trust with the job. For the time being, the scholarly apparatus in the Spanish editions of Borges used by researchers compares badly with what is available for other classic twentieth-century authors like Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, or Marcel Proust.<\/p>\n
This need not have been the case. The publisher Sudamericana, owned by Penguin\/Random House, outbid Borges\u2019s old publisher Emec\u00e9 for the worldwide rights to his work at the 2010 Frankfurt Bookfair. News reports suggest they paid close to two million euros. Unfortunately, the 2010 Sudamericana edition, the version I own, was a missed opportunity to produce a quality integral Borges for the twenty-first century. It simultaneously respects and ignores the author\u2019s wishes. Many of the early texts have been extensively rewritten by the older Borges, who grew to dislike his youthful style but there are no notes to indicate the changes. In the same edition, three early books of essays the writer suppressed entirely during his lifetime are republished in their original form. It is almost impossible to trace the development of Borges\u2019s style and ideas using this or any other edition because none of them offer even the most minimal explanation of the chaotic, non-chronological sequencing of the collected texts. Kodama herself acknowledges that the other main Spanish-language option on the market, the 2009 Emec\u00e9 critical edition, is really only an annotated edition. The notes are manifestly inadequate for the purpose of scholarship.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for English and Spanish speakers, the best version of Borges in any language is the French Oeuvres Compl\u00e8tes published by Gallimard. The second edition was delayed for ten years as Kodama brought charges against Borges\u2019s old friend, the editor Jean-Pierre Bern\u00e8s, in the French courts. She eventually succeeded in forcing him to hand over copies of recordings he had made while collaborating with Borges in 1986 on the notes for the first edition. As a result of this falling out, non-French speakers are unlikely to be able to access Borges and Jean-Pierre Bern\u00e8s\u2019s extensive notes any time soon.<\/p>\n
More recently, Kodama has used the financial resources and institutional power of the estate to pursue young experimental writers, such as the Spaniard Agust\u00edn Fern\u00e1ndez Mallo and the Argentine Pablo Katchadjian, who have creatively appropriated Borges\u2019s writing. Katchadjian faced the possibility of up to six years of jail time and a US $80,000 fine for publishing 150 copies of El Aleph Engordado (the Fattened Aleph), his novella-length expansion of Borges\u2019s famous story, through a tiny Argentine independent publisher. Legitimate artistic practice or a violation of intellectual property? Either way, the case more or less destroyed whatever goodwill was left towards Kodama among the younger generation of Spanish-speaking writers and intellectuals.<\/p>\n
From the window of the caf\u00e9, a slab of blue sky was visible between the roofs of the grey and brown apartment towers of the Recoleta. As lunchtime approached, I was coming to the end of my three-page list of questions. But Kodama showed no signs of impatience or boredom.<\/p>\n
\u2018What do you miss about Borges?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018He is inside me. I feel he accompanies me spiritually and that he has given me the strength to fight for all these years. Yes, I miss the way we had fun together.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018As you grow older, what motivates you to keep promoting Borges\u2019s work so energetically through the Foundation?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018This has been my job for thirty years. You only give your life to something if you love it madly. If I didn\u2019t love him madly, I wouldn\u2019t do it.\u2019<\/p>\n
Others have asked Mar\u00eda Kodama what will happen to the estate when she dies. Her answer rarely changes \u2013 \u2018Why would you ask me that? I plan to live for 200 years\u2019 \u2013 so I didn\u2019t ask. Though the conversation often drifted back to Borges, I had learned many things about her over the last three hours: that she cannot cook; that she used to like horse riding and dancing flamenco, but nowadays prefers to meditate and read; that she sleeps only five hours a night; that she is so dispirited by Argentine politics she has not opened a newspaper since the year 2000.<\/p>\n
I asked her, before we parted, which of the books she used to read aloud for Borges she most liked to share with him. \u2018I liked to read for him in Greek,\u2019 she said. Kodama studied ancient Greek at university, Borges never had. \u2018He always said he envied the fact I could read Greek. And I would say, \u2018Borges let me have this one thing.\u2019 The Iliad was their favourite. He knew many passages from Homer so well he could follow the gist though he didn\u2019t speak the language. Kodama quoted a passage to me in Greek, there on the sunny corner of Corrientes and Juncal \u2013 a scene that was often in her thoughts in Geneva while Borges was dying. A brief Spanish gloss, another kiss on the cheek, and she was gone.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until several weeks later, back in Australia, that I had a chance to look up the passage. I found it in book six of the Iliad, in my copy of Fagles\u2019 translation. When Andromache follows Hector to the gates of Troy, with their baby son in her arms, she begs him not to return to the battlefield because she has already lost her mother, father, and seven brothers, and he is her only surviving family. This was the passage Mar\u00eda Kodama recited to me as we parted:<\/p>\n
You, Hector \u2013 you are my father now, my noble mother
\na brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm
\nand strong!
\nPity me, please! Take your stand on the ramparts here,
\nbefore you orphan your son and make your wife a widow.<\/p>\n