¡Pío Peep! Traditional Spanish Nursery Rhymes
Folklore, fables and fairy tales
Synthetic audio
Summary
Spanish oral folklore is rich in nursery rhymes and songs. Some rhymes are fragments of ancient medieval ballads; others, such as De colores, are old harvest songs. Some are frequently sung as lullabies, like Este niño lindo, others as finger… plays, like Palmas palmitas. Some rhymes accompany games, such as El patio de mi casa, while others are unending rhymes that can be repeated as long as the child wants, like El barquito or La hormiguita. In most cases the rhymes and songs originated in Spain and crossed the Atlantic with the language, to delight children in all the nineteen Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America as well as the American Southwest, occasionally changing along the way. Of the ones we have collected here, three are from Mexico--La víbora de la mar, La piñata, and Tortillitas--the rest are well-known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. We have purposely selected some of the best known and most loved rhymes as an introduction to this genre. To make the selection for this book, we reviewed numerous anthologies from Spain and Latin America, among them those of Carmen Bravo Villasante, Arturo Medina, and Ana Pellegrin in Spain; Elsa Isabel Bornemann and Maria Elena Walsh in Argentina; the series Así cantan y juegan..., published by CONAFE in Mexico, and many more. Finally, faced with the decision to select among hundreds, we chose those nursery rhymes and songs that we cherished in our own childhoods, and those the numerous children--Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Central American--with whom we have worked love the most. En este libro la palabra se hace canto y juego para los más pequeñitos. Dirigida a niños de uno a seis años, esta maravillosa colección bilingüe de rimas tradicionales infantiles, que han sido transmitidas de generación en generación, que celebra la infancia y la herencia española y latinoamericana, será un fiel acompañante de los niños al momento de dormir o de jugar. Los versos se caracterizan por su gran ritmisidad y las adaptaciones inglesas son excelentes pues mantienen el ritmo, metro y sentido general de las originales, haciendo las rimas tan inolvidables y fácilmente memorizadas tanto en inglés como lo son en el idioma español. Esta colección, ilustrada bellamente por una artista española, está destinada a encantar a los niños y a transformarse en un clásico tanto para los más pequeños como para la familia.