BORGES, Jorge Luis. El Estilo y la Tiempo.ca. 1928. Three octavo pages, approximately 1330 words holograph manuscript on unlined notebook paper, written on versos only. Condition: some minor overall toning. BORGES ON THE SOUL OF WRITING AND TRANSLATION. A watershed essay in Borges's opus, first published in La Prensa in 1928. Though not quite a "Poetics," the present essay does lay out Borges's thoughts on the act of writing and on the meaning of the word "style." It was re-worked three years later and re-named "La supersticiosa ética del lector" and published in 1931 in Azul, and later in 1932 in Discusión. Borges takes up the cause of Cervantes "messy" or unkempt prose and argues that a writer's style in of much less importance than the world it creates, the essence that survives translations and notes: "The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the "perfect" page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process." A late state of this gem of a critical essay, now showing up more frequently as university course reading, with only two minor corrections, we are unaware, however, of another extant manuscript of it.