Borges's grave in Geneva.

The newspaper Perfil reported on a current proposal in the Argentine Congress to repatriate the remains of Jorge Luis Borges and bury him in the family vault at the ornate Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. The proposal was presented by a Peronist lawmaker, Maria Beatriz Lenz. It is also backed by the head of the Argentine Society of Writers, Alexander Vaccaro, a well-known biographer of the writer. They want to return his remains for the August 24th celebration of the 110th anniversary of Borges’s birth.

Borges is currently buried in Geneva, and it is well documented that he knew his death was near, and chose to die in Geneva. The city had significance for him dating from his stay there as an adolescent. Borges himself was intensely anti-Peronist, so the initiative seems to fly in the face of the author’s wishes.

His widow and heir, Maria Kodama, when contacted by Agence France Presse, expressed her extreme sadness at the proposal, saying, “In a democracy, no one, no party, can take a person’s body, that is the most sacred thing.”

Borges wanted to avoid the Buenos Aires media circus according to Jeff Barry, on his blog Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance. Barry writes on Borges’s views: “A few years before his death Borges gave a lecture at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires titled Immortality: ‘I don’t want to continue being Jorge Luis Borges; I want to be someone else. I hope that my death will be total; I hope to die in body and soul.’

Regarding immortality Borges said, ‘I myself do not desire it, and I fear it, for it would be frightening to know that I am going to continue, frightening to think that I am going to go on being Borges. I am tired of myself, of my name, and of my fame, and I want to free myself from all that.'”

“Despite those melancholy statements the lecture is not pessimistic. Borges went on to say that ‘Each time we repeat a line by Dante or Shakespeare, we are, in some way, that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created that line. Immortality is in the memory of others and in the work we leave behind.'”

He is buried in a simple grave at the Cimetière de Plainpalais in Geneva, and on his tombstone is a quotation from the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon”: “and ne forhtedon ná”, and be not afraid.