Sept haï-kaïs "La petite tortue ...", is only seventeen measures long—the number of syllables in a Japanese haiku. Alexis Roland-Manuel remarked on this "mélodie": "Do not let your modesty make you forget a certain fable by La Fontaine. You hurry slowly, perhaps, but none of your steps are wasted. How many hares envy you!" The harmony is pricked with fine, expressive dissonances. For the third "mélodie", "Le coq ...", the instruments "peck" the melody with appoggiaturas in a spirit similar to that in Ravel's "Histoires naturelles" (1906). According to Andrieu, "Maurice Delage's composition is simple and refined; the composer stays ever attentive
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