Haiku such as "kyo" () may look like two syllables to English speakers but are in fact a single "on" (as well as a single syllable) in Japanese. In 1973, the Haiku Society of America noted that the norm for writers of haiku in English was to use 17 syllables, but they also noted a trend toward shorter haiku. Shorter haiku are very much more common in 21st century English haiku writing. Some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about 12 syllables in English approximate the duration of 17 Japanese "on". Also in translations four lines is more appropriate for
Haiku the 31 poems contained in "Microgramas" (Tokio 1940) and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges in the collection "La cifra" (1981). In Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil, after several early false starts, including a collection of 56 by Waldomiro Siqueira Jr. (1912–?) in his "Haikais" (São Paulo 1933), the form was popularised by Guilherme de Almeida, first through his 1937 magazine article "Os Meus Haicais" and then in his collection "Poesia Vária" (1947).. Since Modernism, several anthologies of Brazilian haikai have been published. In 1992 Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz published the volume "Haiku" in which he translated from English to Polish haiku of