Better Living through Guillemets (and Russian)

[Karen Brattain]

Just about the same time Cliff wrote his post about guillemets, I made a discovery in The Master and Margarita. In these excerpts, taken from chapter four, I found the horizontal bar used to mark speech and guillemets used for inner dialogue.

In English, some books differentiate between the spoken and unspoken by using quotation marks and italics, respectively. Good Friday, by Tony Wolk, is one example. So here is another method.

My only complaint is that many em dashes also occur in Master & Margarita, and the em dashes and horizontal bars are indistinguishable. (In fact, I’d venture to say they are all em dashes.) So in places it is difficult to tell where speech breaks off and where it picks up again. I'm curious to examine other versions of this book to see how they have been typeset.

I love the guillemets. They are useful and sophisticated.

Translations
Again, I’m doing my best.

(1) “Annushka, our Annushka! From Sadovaia! It’s her doing…”
(2) “Annushka… Annushka?” the poet muttered, anxiously looking around. “Let’s see, let’s see…”
(3) But allow me to ask—how?! Oh no, we'll find that out! [The poet thinks to himself.]