By the seventeenth century the Japanese had brought this “wordless” poetry to perfection in the haiku, the poem of just seventeen syllables which drops the subject almost as it takes it up. To non-Japanese people haiku are apt to seem no more than beginnings or even titles for poems, and in translation it is impossible to convey the effect of their sound and rhythm. However, translation can usually convey the image–and this is the important point.
