This Sunday at 7 p.m., the Maintenance Shop will host the final reading of this semester’s Word Up! series. This event will consist of Spanish poems, some of which will be translated into English, and others will be read in their original Spanish.

Covadonga Arango, an Iowa State Spanish instructor from Spain, will read poems by Pablo Neruda of Chile, Ruben Vario of Nicaragua, Antonio Machado and Federico Garcia Lorca, among other Spanish poets.

“I really love to read poems from my culture and my country,” Arango said. “The kind of poetry we have chosen is love poetry and social poetry — not only poetry about love between man and woman, but poetry about friendship, solidarity, freedom.” Enrique Santiago will join Arango in reading these poems.

Elizabeth Trejos-Castillo, a Costa Rican poet on a Fulbrite scholarship, will read from her two collections of poetry. One, In the Absolute Forest of Your Eyes, was published in Costa Rica in 1992.

“I think it is a very good opportunity to read in English and Spanish and to share with the students and the people living here Latin American poetry,” Trejos-Castillo said. She feels its variety makes Latin American poetry special.

“We have a mix of so many races, and poetry has a different reality — a different way to look at the world,” Trejos-Castillo said. “[The poetry] also has to do with the suffering of the people — the social problems, economic problems and things like that. The poetry, I believe, is stronger than the American poetry. Latin American poetry is having its gold decade,” she added.

“I wanted to have a bilingual reading,” said Debra Marquart, assistant professor of English at ISU, “because we have Elizabeth Trejos-Castillo, a student here at Iowa State who has a book of poetry published in Costa Rica.

“And then we have a woman on our faculty here at Iowa State in the English Department — Susan Benner — who has been editing an anthology called Fire from the Andes,” which was co-authored and co-translated by Kathy Leonard, Marquart said. The book is forthcoming and contains translations of short stories from the Andes, Bolivia and Peru. Benner will read some of these in English, Marquart said.

“I think that for me the whole idea of having a bilingual reading is to honor all that really fine writing that comes out of places like Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico,” Marquart said.

“I don’t understand Spanish, so I’ll just listen and enjoy the sounds,” Marquart said, “but I really won’t understand what they’re about.” But some of the poems will be read both in English and Spanish, so that people will know what they say.

Word Up! is held in the M-Shop at 7 p.m. Sunday. The event is free and open to the public.