Witold Gombrowicz on Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

This might be slightly out of the range of this blog, except that I have blogged in English as well as in Esperanto about both of these writers. But there's another connection, which relates also to interlinguistics, i.e. the history of artificial languages and particularly the ars combinatoria, which I've written about in connection with Borges. Gombrowicz, living in exile in Argentina, encountered Borges and had a low opinion of him, documented in his Diary:

Witold Gombrowicz on Jorge Luis Borges

The following sentence, from an entry in volume 3, 1962, is the reason for me mentioning this here:

What could arouse greater enthusiasm in pure-blooded writers than this kind of bloodless, literary, verbal, unseeing writer who sees nothing except his own mental combinations? [Boldface mine—RD]

Witold Gombrowicz

There is no indication that Gombrowicz has in mind a connection between Borges's combinatorial proclivities mentioned here and the combinatorial logic behind the ars combinatoria or the characteristica universalis, but I made the connection, and that's good enough for me.