Some of his journalism was published posthumously as Cuadernos de vivir y pensar (Notebooks of Living and Thinking, 1984).
As a poet, although identified personally with the avant-garde of his time, he wrote largely in traditional forms rather than free verse, and rejected what he viewed as his contemporaries' excessive use of metaphor.
[2] Mastronardi figures as a minor character in Borges's short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
Writing of Mastronardi in 1986 in the newspaper El País (Madrid), Borges said of Mastronardi that "Like Auguste Dupin ... [the detective character created by Edgar Allan Poe] ... at night he went about the streets of Buenos Aires looking for that intellectual stimulus that only can be given by nighttime in a great city.
In contrast, narrative, criticism, and essays (almost uncultivated among us), demand preparatory work and organic development."