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Abstract:

The article focuses on the problem of preserving and interpreting the emblems included in one of the episodes The Pilgrim’s Progress by J. Bunyan (the episode in the Interpreter’s House) in adaptations of Bunyan’s book for readers of the 18^th– 21^st centuries. The object of study is the meaning of the Interpreter’s image and the content and form of the emblematic descriptions included into the given episode. The subject of the study is the peculiarities of the source text transformation in adaptations of the 18th–21st centuries. The study is based on Bunyan’s book and its remakes of the 18^th–21^st centuries. The tasks of the study were as follows: to describe the nature and existence of the emblem in the texts of the Baroque era, to trace the evolution of the emblems that were part of the given episode in the 18^th–21^st centuries; determine the ways of changing the source text. The study showed that the episode in the Interpreter’s house, which includes seven emblems, became a model for similar episodes in the reworkings of the book. Even a radical change in the genre does not lead to the exclusion of the given episode from the plot. The reworking of both the entire book and the given episode went in two ways. On the one hand, The Pilgrim’s Progress was abridged, the plot was simplified, outdated vocabulary and grammatical forms were replaced with more modern ones. At the same time, the original complex of emblems was destroyed, but the remaining Banyan emblems were included in mini-complexes that met the needs of the readership. On the other hand, already in the 18th century there appeared literary retellings of The Pilgrim’s Progress, new works in which the episode in the Interpreter’s house and the emblems included in it inspired the authors of adaptations to create their own complexes of emblems.