Last Thursday, I attended the Literature Is Alive event presented by OOMPH! This poetry recitation was interesting for several reasons, the main one being that the poems were in Spanish. Having not taken Spanish since the fifth grade, it was at first very disorienting. While there were English translations, it was not easy to follow along while listening to it in Spanish. I soon realized that it was better to just skim the English translation and then just listen to the Spanish reciting. Because these poems were written in Spanish, it is difficult to capture the melody and harmony of the poetry in English and thus the true meaning of the poems can only be captured by being recited in the language it was written and produced in. Despite not understanding most of the meaning of the poems it was still interesting to hear the poems recited. One thing I realized that was really interesting was that even though I could not understand the meaning, just by hearing someone recite the poems aloud allowed me to differentiate between the tones and moods. Each author recited his/her poem in a different fashion with a different tone of voice and just from this I could detect the tone/mood of the poem without even knowing what the poem was about. I thought at the beginning that because I had no idea what they were talking about I would not be able to really detect a difference, but I was very wrong. I realized how similar it is to hearing a poem in English and detecting the different ways a poet recites it. I also thought the conversation at the end about translation was really interesting. Especially with poetry, I realize how difficult it must be to translate between two different languages and having to decide whether to try to translate word for word or try to capture the meaning. Overall, this presentation was really interesting and I’m glad I had the experience of going and listening to everyone’s commentary as well.