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This article is one of the outcomes of recent research I carried out in Uganda between June and September 2014. During this period I was interested in the obtaining presences of William Shakespeare and John Ruganda in contemporary Ugandan audiences: theatres, schools, universities, cultural centers, cinema halls and the everyday readers. While interacting with Cornelius Gulere Wambi, one of my key respondents, I was pleasantly struck by his ongoing “new project” in which he was concurrently translating five drama texts from English into Lusoga, one of the major indigenous Bantu languages, very close to the rather dominant Luganda spoken in the central and southern parts of Uganda. The texts which Gulere was translating are Austin Bukenya’s The Bride (as Omugole), Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero (as Ebikemo by’Owoluganda Yero), Sophocles’ Antigone (as Nantamegwa), Francis Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City (as Nkwe mu Kibuga) and William Shakespeare’s King Lear (as Kyabazinga Mukama). Overall, these plays are an innovative intervention in the literary realities invigorated in Lusoga expression and adorned in new language and diction. However, my research interests directed me to Shakespeare’s King Lear translated as Kyabazinga Mukama, particularly in the context of providing further alternative writings and readings of Shakespeare in a contemporary African cultural space.1 By the time of drafting this paper, Gulere Wambi had translated King Lear’s Act 1 to a tentative conclusion.2 The translation is based on the free online edition of King Lear, published by PSU. So far, his translation of King Lear from English to Lusoga is clearly a project in re-language-ing or, even more inclusively, an exercise in reconfiguring Shakespeare. Gulere’s is a relanguage-ing which in itself is a form of editing and at the same time a specific mode of presenting Shakespeare to both the new and qualified Lusoga readers.3 In this discussion I found two concepts helpful: Taban lo Liyong’s observation that translation is a sine qua non in securing African languages and literatures in the global arena of the twenty first century and beyond; and Charles Cantalupo’s positing that only when two or more languages meet do real meanings emerge.4 That the language of expression in a translation plays a major role in the transmission of a new message in a new way is perhaps a given. However, when two languages meet in a translation, the resultant text seems to perform more tasks than convey what is in the original text, if ever the original can be found. It may be of help to remind ourselves that Shakespeare himself created new meanings from texts – some of which were not in English – through the act of Englishing them. Similarly, we may say that what Gulere does in the process of translating King Lear is to Lusogafy the play in the context of two languages meeting and generating new

Re-language-ing Shakespeare for a Ugandan readership: Potentials and pitfalls of translating King Lear in a Ugandan language