Opera or poetry: Those are two of your choices at 7 p.m. June 25 if you are looking for an arts event at UC Davis.

The former is the San Francisco Opera's December 2007 production of Madama Butterfly. It is not being presented live at UC Davis; instead, a recording from San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House will be screened in Jackson Hall at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

The 2-hour, 45-minute opera (with a 10-minute intermission) is sung in Italian with English supertitles. Watch a preview.

One of the world’s most beloved and dramatic operas, Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini is a classic tale of colliding hearts and cultures set in 19th-century Japan.

Internationally acclaimed soprano Patricia Racette is Cio-Cio-San, a geisha tragically torn between two worlds and forced to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to retain her honor.

Music Director Donald Runnicles conducts the SF Opera Orchestra and Chorus in this stirring production that features some of Puccini’s most popular music.

A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer wrote this: “A compelling and almost breathlessly taut rendition of this timeless tragedy. ... Patricia Racette’s portrayal is an incendiary performance.”

Tickets: $15 regular, $7.50 for students and children. (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or www.mondaviarts.org.

Poetry in the Garden is a free event scheduled the same time, same day: 7 p.m. June 25. The arboretum is the sponsor, and the location is the Wyatt Deck next to the redwood grove.

Organizers said award-winning poets and translators John Oliver Simon and William O’Daly will read their own poems, in English and Spanish.

Simon has been exploring Latin America and translating its poetry for two decades. His books include Caminante, written during a nine-month voyage south of the border in the mid-1990s; Ghosts of the Palace of Blue Tiles, a chapbook of translations of the young Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados; and Translations of Light, a selection of Simon's poems in Spanish and English.

Simon won a 2001 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Velocities of the Possible, his translations of the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas.

Simon is artistic director of Poetry Inside Out, a project of the Center for Art in Translation. He conducts long-term residencies in second- through eighth-grade classrooms in the East Bay, focusing on the translation of great Spanish-language poetry, together with writing poetry inspired by this process.

O’Daly has published eight translations of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, as well as a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he has worked as a literary and technical editor, a college professor and an instructional designer, and his poems, translations, essays and reviews have been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies.

With co-author Han-ping Chin, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

For more information, contact the arboretum: (530) 752-4880 or arboretum.ucdavis.edu.