William Burroughs’ Cut-Ups Lost and Found in Translation

Burroughs’ experimental “cut-up” texts of the 1960s have presented great challenges to readers, critics, and translators, and their French translations have proved especially controversial. This article argues that what has been lost in translation for Francophone readers can, however, make visible key features of cut-up texts that have been missed or misunderstood by anglophone readers, above all their intertextuality. As revealed by a close comparative study of his first cut-ups in Minutes to Go, published in Paris in 1960 and translated into French in the 1970s, Burroughs’ work was not only intertextual from the start but itself constituted a practice of translation.