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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 of Books
“He captures the humor, the vulgarity and the suspense, educating and entertaining in the process.”
— Associated Press
Illustrated by Erik Brinkman
View Illustrations from:
The Miller's Tale
The Pardoner's Tale
The Wife of Bath's Tale
The Knight's Tale
Excerpt from the Introduction:
Historically Chaucer seemed like an excellent candidate for comparison with hip-hop because of his closeness to the oral traditions of England and the extent of his influence on future generations of poets, including Shakespeare, and also because Chaucer’s particular dialect of English was later accepted as the written standard. For these and many other reasons he has been recognized for centuries as the “father of English poetry,” and thus Chaucer and hip-hop could be seen as bookends representing the earliest and latest expressions of rhymed narrative verse in the English language.
The most remarkable analogies I found between Chaucer and hip-hop were not only historical, however; they were also reflected explicitly in the organizational structure of The Canterbury Tales. The text consists of a collection of stories that Chaucer wrote over the course of about fifteen years towards the end of his life. Some of the Tales were apparently composed before he began the compilation, while others were obviously tailor-made for the project. To bring all of these different stories together into one, Chaucer creates a fictional company of pilgrims riding on horseback from London to Canterbury, who all decide to play a game to help pass the time along the way: a storytelling contest. Each tale represents an entry in the contest by one of the pilgrims, and Chaucer ascribes certain personality traits to each of them, which are then reflected in the tale. What begins on the surface as a religious pilgrimage soon takes a profane turn when the stories become a vehicle for challenges and insults aimed at the other pilgrims. Chaucer employs the competition as a unifying principle, and also as a device to expose social tensions among the pilgrims, while showcasing their different storytelling techniques and levels of ability.
The clearest analogy for this storytelling contest model in hip-hop culture is the phenomenon of the freestyle battle, a live performance event that underlies the majority of recorded rap lyrics either in style or content. By definition, a freestyle is a rap that is unwritten and unrehearsed, composed by the rapper in the moment of performance, with rhymes that are improvised on beat and, when required, on topic. A freestyle battle is when two or more rappers compete in this way head to head, using punch lines, boasts, and insults to out-rhyme and outwit their opponents. The two terms aren’t interchangeable though, since written rhymes are sometimes used in battles, and freestyles are often simple demonstrations of ability rather than direct competitions. Freestyle and battling perform the same function in hip-hop culture as Chaucer’s storytelling competition does in The Canterbury Tales, dramatizing social tensions among rappers and showcasing different techniques and levels of ability. These systems were developed in response to the particular conditions of hip-hop’s genesis.