Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman is taking a rap 'translation' of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on a tour of British schools.
The project grew out of a thesis where Brinkman compared Chaucer's poetics with modern rap. "This seemed a natural extension," he told the Cambridge Evening News. "Since then the project has snowballed into a successful one-man theatrical performance, a series of educational presentations and workshops and a CD recording."
But the version which he performed at last year's Edinburgh fringe has been "toned down" for younger audiences. "The translations stay as close as possible to the tone and thrust of the original Tales," he said, "while completely updating the language into a lively hip-hop rhyme style. They are occasionally a bit raunchy, but I relinquish all due credit and blame to Chaucer, as he did to his 'sources'."
So what's next? A 'lively' R&B retelling of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage? A Stock-Aitken-Waterman Paradise Lost? A musical of Romeo and Juliet set in the Bronx? Hang on a minute ...
