Voices from Chernobyl contains the following:
There was one guy. He came back here from jail under the amnesty. He lived in the next village.
What was "the amnesty"?
asked Oct 17 at 17:52
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1I believe Russian doesn't actually have articles, right? So perhaps this would have been better translated as "He came back here from jail under amnesty"– AakashMCommented Oct 18 at 10:00
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1@AakashM No, a good translation is not simply a word-replacement algorithm. It conveys the meaning and the tone of the original text. If we were translating a sentence from English to Russian we would remove the articles, and from Russian to English we add them.– Jay McEhCommented Oct 18 at 16:07
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@JayMcEh I'm not saying a translation from Russian to English should never supply articles. Equally, I don't suppose you're saying that a translation should always include them, are you? I'm saying maybe in this instance (where I don't know the original Russian), maybe a better translation could convey the idea of "in accordance with the general concept of amnesty" rather than "according to the terms of the particular amnesty of day-month-year". If, of course, that was the intended meaning!– AakashMCommented Oct 18 at 21:13
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Could you please give some more context to the quote? First, which part of the book is this from? Second, is there any information that hints at whether this is about Belarus or Ukraine? (Especially since Belarus suffered from from the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster than Ukraine.)– TsundokuCommented Oct 20 at 18:30
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2@AakashM Interestingly in my version the quote uses the indefinite article: “It was under a prisoner amnesty.” It comes down to the translator's decision.– Clara Díaz SanchezCommented Oct 23 at 14:10
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1 Answer
Prison amnesties have been a feature of the Russian (and later the Soviet and post-Soviet republics) penal system since the time of Catherine the Great. On a practical level they occur when the prison system becomes overloaded, and it is necessary to release some prisoners to prevent it collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers. As noted here:
The Russian government, like the Soviet Union before it, has regulated prison population growth mainly by declaring periodic amnesties.
Ostensibly of course, they occur to commemorate some historical event and demonstrate the state's mercy. In Russia, for example, general amnesties were declared on the 50th, 55th, 60th, 65th, and 70th anniversaries of "Victory Day", to celebrate the end of the Second World War.
Since the the monologue in question is undated, it is not possible to give a precise date to the amnesty under which the man was released. The village where the monologue was recorded was Bely Bereg in the Narovlya District of Belarus, near the Ukraine border some 40 km north-west of Chernobyl in the somewhat euphemistically-named "Palieski State Radiological Reserve". The monologue is set in the context of people beginning to surreptitiously (and illegally) return to the contaminated areas, roughly a decade or so after the accident. Indeed one of the speakers says it has been "seven years since everybody left", although we do not know how precise this statement is. Of the many prison amnesties that would affect people living in this area, one possibility is the amnesty of 1994 of Ukraine, celebrating the third anniversary of Ukrainian independence. It applied to:
a variety of prison inmates, including those whose crimes are not considered serious, women and some men with young children, those "who have taken the road of correction", veterans, certain invalids, pregnant women, men over 60 and women over 55 and those involved in the Chernobyl clean-up
Another possibility would be the amnesty of 1995, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Victory Day, held in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (and many other ex-Soviet states). In the absence of more details, there are many other possibilities of course.
answered Oct 17 at 19:16
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The answer assumes that the village in the quote is in Ukraine (because Chernobyl is in Ukraine?), but Svetlana Alexievich is from Belarus and Belarus suffered more from the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster (with 23% of its land contaminated, as opposed to 4.8% of Ukraine) than Ukraine. (The wind blew north after the disaster.)– TsundokuCommented Oct 20 at 18:34
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No, the answer does not assume the village is in Ukraine - in the first sentence I point out that the "amnesty system" occurs in many of the post-Soviet republics. I gave the example of the Ukraine independence day amnesty as a general example of how the amnesties work, and which could possibly have applied to the man in question (even if the village was in Belarus we are not told where he was incarcerated). Commented Oct 20 at 19:13