What this translation means
On Daljit Ami’s translation of Amandeep Sandhu’s novel Roll of Honour By Rajesh Sharma There are books with souls and there are books without souls. Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour is a book with a soul. What impregnates a book with a soul is the writer’s capacity to undergo the baptism of truth. To bear witness. To submit to the knowing that truth entails. The novel bears out that those who side with truth take no sides. Sandhu tells a very Punjabi story without succumbing to the baneful provincialism of today’s decadent cultural production. Ami’s decision to translate the novel’s title as Gawah de Phanah Hon ton Pahilan ( Before the Witness Ceases to Be ) could only have been made because he was able to peer into the novel’s soul. And that happened because the ways of the two witnesses, Ami and Sandhu, crossed. Ami saw himself in the novel, saw his own life, saw his own experience of history. As a historian and documentarist reading and translating a nov...