Oyub Titiyev during his farce of a trial.
Shura Burtin, “Monitor 1”
You may have heard of Oyub Titiyev (also transliterated “Titiev”), the Chechen human rights defender who in 2018 was arrested on false charges and in 2019 sentenced to four years in a penal colony. I was asked to translate journalist Shura Burtin’s long piece on Titiyev, “Monitor 1,” for consideration for the inaugural True Story journalism award. Read “Monitor 1” here.
Shura Burtin’s piece is deceptively simple. One phrase from an interview with Titiyev’s sister, Сядешь — будет незаметно (literally, “when you sit down it will not be noticeable”), was a special challenge because of сядешь (“you will sit”). It does mean “you will sit down,” but it is also a slang term meaning “you will go to prison.” The sister’s unintended meaning gestures toward Titiyev’s future when he was, indeed, sentenced to prison, and this meaning needs to resonate strongly when Burtin repeats the phrase near the end of the piece. But the phrase itself, regardless of the variety of associations it prompts, must be the same both times it is used. So I retained the word “sit,” but added language reminiscent of “remaining in the spot that has been assigned to you by the authorities” and of “whether the people around you know there’s a problem.” Both of these concerns were central for Titiyev, both in the childhood story and today; it’s just that now he does the opposite of what his sister told him to do all those years ago.
“I remember one time mama sewed a patch on his pants, on the backside,” Oyub’s older sister recalls. “He was in the second or third grade. [Mama] said, ‘Wear these to school, the other ones aren’t dry yet.’ He was unhappy, but he got dressed and got his things together, his book bag and everything, and left. He didn’t say a word. Mama says to me, ‘I know he’s probably hiding somewhere, give him a minute and then follow him.’ I went out and tracked him down: he had gone around the corner of the neighbor’s house and stopped. I wait, wait a little more, he doesn’t come out. So I go up to him and I say, ‘You’re going to get in trouble with mama’ – our mama was strict, too. ‘Look, you can’t even see it. Go in like that today, Oyub. Just sit there in your place and nobody’ll ever know.’ …”