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.”

Baba Brinkman was born in British Columbia’s West Kootenays in 1978 and grew up in Vancouver. He is the child of B.C.’s tree-planting subculture, which was founded in the 1970s by his parents and their friends. Brinkman planted trees himself every summer from 1994 to 2003 and has personally planted over a million trees. During this time he also earned a master’s degree in medieval and Renaissance literature from the University of Victoria. His thesis made connections between hip-hop culture and poetry in England in the fourteenth century.Brinkman started rapping in 1998 at the age of nineteen, and he brings a rare literary aesthetic to his rap-poetry. Since graduating he has produced and distributed two full-length albums independently, Swordplay and The Rap Canterbury Tales, as well as two EPs and dozens of collaborations. He also toured the performance piece “The Rap Canterbury Tales” to arts festivals around the world in 2004–05, including Edinburgh, Montreal, Prague, London, and San Francisco. In the spring of 2005 he was sponsored by Cambridge University’s English Department to perform in dozens of schools in the U.K.Between frequent tours and recording projects, Brinkman currently resides in Vancouver.

Baba Brinkman's profile page

Erik Brinkman, who illustrated Baba Brinkman’s The Rap Canterbury Tales, grew up in Vancouver and honed his craft as a graffiti artist and stained glass practitioner. He draws his inspiration from his traveling adventures overseas, as well as his tree-planting experiences in British Columbia, Alberta, Costa Rica, Australia, and Ecuador, where he also apprenticed with a Quechua shaman for six months in the Amazon.

Erik Brinkman's profile page

“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.” — Bloomsbury Review

The Rap Canterbury Tales