FairgroundTown doesn't usually have much time for attempts to update The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer's extensive use of rhyme and word-play leaves his would-be translators in an impossible bind, whereby they are forced to choose between sacrificing the rhythm or the meaning of the original, either of which leaves the work somewhat bereft*.

However, we have recently come across a new translation - one which we feel really works - and it owes far less to the dusty halls of England's great universities (Oxford, Cambridge and, of course, Hull) than it does to a trailer park in Detroit.

Canadian artist Baba Brinkman's re-working of four of the best known tales (the Knight, Miller, Pardoner and Wife of Bath) is solidly founded in the original texts - a faithful translation that preserves both the rhyme and the reason of Chaucer's masterpiece. However, unless your name is Hailie Jade Scott, these not you dad's Canterbury Tales, because this translation is also a hip-hop record, cut through with samples and heavy beats, straight out of the musical neighborhood that gave us the 21st century's first son of modern verse - Eminem.

Indeed, on the track Rhyme Renaissance, Brinkman draws a direct line from Chaucer to the hip-hop scene - placing both in the context of an ancient tradition of performance poetry and story-telling through rhyming verse.

This, we feel, also tells us something about the unique appeal of Eminem's one, career-defining, moment of unqualified genius - Stan. It isn't just a bad-ass rhyme with a hypnotic beat and Dido's haunting chorus - it is a story that plays out over several verses, with words like African drums, rising in intensity to their dark conclusion. It plays to the same fundamental human rythms as Chaucer did 600 years ago. It is, you might say, Eminem's own Canterbury Tale.

* See Coghill and Wright for either side of this unhappy coin.