“The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.”

"On Dubbing" ["Sobre el doblaje"]
Discussion (1932)
Context: The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.

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Do you have more details about the quote "The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful." by Jorge Luis Borges?
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Jorge Luis Borges 213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986

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