Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges shared a literary partnership spanning decades. Now, a massive two-volume edition of Bioy Casares’s diaries about Borges returns to bookstores across Argentina, bringing back thousands of detailed pages, extensive annotations, and decades of intense cultural debate.
Published by Editorial Planeta, the release carries a print run of 6,000 copies and a retail price of 189,900 pesos. The monumental collection hits shelves in a two-volume hardcover set enclosed in a presentation box, containing 2,060 pages of text and thousands of detailed footnotes.
Diaries Return After Twenty Years
For twenty years, finding an intact copy of the diaries required traversing a dry second-hand market where scarce volumes commanded exorbitant sums, sometimes reaching up to a million pesos. Social media discussions even referenced a tongue-in-cheek Borges Index to gauge local economic variables. Their friendship began in 1931.
Literary executor Daniel Martino worked closely with Bioy Casares during his final years to organize the papers. Martino recognized that extracting the daily appearances and conversations of Borges from the extensive journals would construct a portrait of the author.
Feud With María Kodama
The return of the diaries to bookstores revives one of the fiercest feuds in modern Argentine letters. When the original edition appeared in 2006, María Kodama—writer, translator, and Borges’s widow and literary executrix—rejected the publication, viewing it as an act of cowardice.
Kodama argued that Borges visited the Bioy household with his guard down, enjoying casual conversation and jokes with his closest friend, unaware that every remark was being cataloged. Following Borges’s death in Geneva in 1986 just months after their marriage, Kodama assumed leadership of the International Jorge Luis Borges Foundation and served as a rigorous executrix managing his literary rights for decades until her own death in 2023.
Kodama maintained that the diary allowed Bioy Casares to enact a revenge for living in the shadow of Borges’s literary reputation. She contended that publishing the text denied Borges any opportunity to contextualize or defend his statements. The tensions surrounding the book escalated over the years, leading supporters of Bioy Casares to organize an “act of redress” in Buenos Aires in 2012 to counter the criticisms.
Editorial Additions by Daniel Martino
The revised edition incorporates two decades of fresh research, newly recovered documents, and manuscript checks conducted by Martino. The updated text restores passages that were omitted from the original 2006 publication, including corrected memories, verified citations, and newly identified sources that clarify obscure historical references.
Among the newly integrated entries are passages concerning María Kodama and the perspectives that Bioy Casares and his wife, Silvina Ocampo, held regarding her relationship with Borges over the years. Thousands of newly added notes help identify figures, while illuminating private domestic tensions and sharp literary judgments.
Madrid Cultural Programming
The publication coincides with events marking the 40th anniversary of Borges’s death. Cultural institutions in Madrid are launching an extensive program centered on the author’s legacy running from October 2 to October 30. The schedule features a public exhibition titled Borges: el otro, el mismo at the Ortega-Marañón Foundation, displaying items from the Museo del Escritor collection, including personal books, rare editions, correspondence, and paintings. Additionally, the Ortega-Marañón Foundation hosts events exploring musical and poetic labyrinths dedicated to Borges, Piazzolla, Yupanqui, and Gardel.