Los 10 perritos (10 Puppies)

Like the puppies in the story, some books jump cheerfully from shelves to be placed back in the hands of readers. Some time ago, we found a copy of 10 Puppies in a second-hand bookshop of our city, originally published by the publishing house Molino, from Barcelona, in their Cuentos Molino collection, and we decided to adopt it. We thought it would be just as appreciated by today’s readers as it would have been by the children who must now be in their eighties.

The book 10 Puppies, no. 13 in the collection, leads the second series. The text by José Mallorquí recreates a children's nursery rhyme that has travelled and changed over time through children's voices. Its origin is uncertain, but it is believed to come from a popular composition titled ‘Ten Little Indians’ that the American composer Septimus Winner published in 1868. ‘Ten Little Indians’ was a great success and shortly afterwards a version with black characters, ‘Ten Little Niggers’, began to circulate in England, inspiring the writer Agatha Christie in 1939 to write her famous mystery novel, now titled And Then There Were None. The author has used popular nursery rhymes in two other detective stories, ‘Five Little Pigs’ and ‘Three Blind Mice’, to remind us that innocence and malice go hand in hand.

According to the curious minds who investigate these matters, the song about the ten little Indians, whom later became little black men, left behind its racist connotations after World War II, spreading to many countries as a genuine children's song that allowed modifications starring fish, bunnies, soldiers, penguins, monkeys, buses, kittens, and puppies. Out of these versions, the most widespread in Spanish culture is the one about puppies, which has almost as many variations as there are speakers of the language. Rhymes guide the action, and each country brings its own special words into play. Thus, the number “siete” is paired with a “machete”, a “tranchete", a “cohete”, a “billete” or “Albacete”. Children enjoy this simple game and enthusiastically applaud the repetition effect. From a practical point of view, the puppies’ song is used to learn numbers and to get started on addition and subtraction. To the metaphysical spirits, it teaches that life is nothing but a succession of additions and subtractions: the puppies come, they go, they return, and so on. It is something we usually discover when we get older, because as children we only sing about it.