Poetry Japanese formal poetry (which was generally referred to as "waka"), and was used more heavily to explore personal rather than public themes. By the tenth century, tanka had become the dominant form of Japanese poetry, to the point where the originally general term "waka" ("Japanese poetry") came to be used exclusively for tanka. Tanka are still widely written today. Haiku is a popular form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, which evolved in the 17th century from the "hokku", or opening verse of a renku. Generally written in a single vertical line, the haiku contains three sections totalling 17 "onji", structured in
Haiku in languages other than Japanese have written haiku in Spanish include Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda. Many other writers across Latin America, including Jorge Luis Borges, have also used the form. A translation of Bashō's "Oku no Hosomichi" to Spanish was done in 1957 by the Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz in collaboration with Japanese diplomat Eikichi Hayashiya. In Italy, the national haiku association was founded in Rome in 1987 by Sono Uchida, the well-known Japanese haijin and the ambassador of Japan in Vatican. Soon after, the national association called Italian Friends of the haiku (Associazione