The Rap Canterbury Tales

Baba Brinkman,

The ambition that inspired rapper and MC Baba Brinkman to transpose his performance piece “The Rap Canterbury Tales” to the printed page was his desire to resurrect Chaucer’s brilliant stories from their vellum mausoleum into visible and audible contemporary forms that would once again delight and edify both live listening audiences and readers—a rebirth of what poetry should be in its essence, and once was. Since Chaucer has become an unassailable icon of print culture, and hip-hop is an unassailable icon of contemporary digital cool, he saw this radical new fusion of content and style as the perfect medium to deliver Chaucer’s astonishingly timeless message to a younger generation growing indifferent to the delights of “archaic” literary forms.

This fusion has produced, with both texts reproduced here on facing pages, one of the most exciting and extraordinarily fertile literary documents of our age.

The raps are presented here—along with Chaucer’s original Middle English, Brinkman’s explanatory introductions, and his brother and stage manager Erik’s illustrations—as the best possible way of telling the story of how these stories came about, and what they were meant to do.

A hugely successful hit at the Edinburgh Festival, Brinkman has worked with the London and Cambridge school systems, rekindling an interest among both performance-poetry fans and students in the work of “the father of the English language.”

“Brinkman has hit a seam of pure creative gold: Hip-hop sparks into new life as Lit-hop, and Chaucer to an entirely new, entirely ‘right’ existence as hip-hop. Brinkman’s mercurial, exhilarating poetic game opens new worlds, by quick turns very funny and seriously gripping.”
—Professor James Simpson, Harvard University

“Chaucer, like Shakespeare, does not translate well to kids these days due to language barriers. When re-jigged and given modern poetic structures (i.e. hip-hop) Baba’s Rap Canterbury Tales is as revolutionary as the King James Bible, bringing Chaucer’s baudy and audacious tales to the kids, an audience that is now able to grasp these universal tales in a familiar tongue. Baba’s version is actually ‘Too cool for school.’”
—Josh Martinez

“[‘The Rap Canterbury Tales’] could hold its own in both the rapping world and the theatre world.”
—The Scotsman (Edinburgh)

“[A] tour de force … ”
—San Francisco Weekly

 

Reviews:

“It’s a fun, crisp, non-literal translation of Chaucer’s work that, at its very best, captures the verve and stylized rhymes of its inspiration … Brinkman focuses on the stylistics itself, something he explains in more detail in his useful and interesting introduction to the piece … The text, and its wonderful illustrations by Erik Brinkman, would make an excellent gift for any Chaucer student, and maybe, just maybe, will get young fans of hip-hop to pick up the Old Master and give Middle English a try for themselves. ”
— Bloomsbury Review

“Brinkman raps in a seamless cadence, updating Geoffrey Chaucer to hip hop … He captures the humor, the vulgarity and the suspense, educating and entertaining in the process.”
— Associated Press