英语时差：日本俳句风靡德国

The ladies who meet regularly in a museum cafe in Cologne skip the gossip and get straight down to haiku, an ultra-brief poetry style that has spread from Japan around the globe.

Cologne's haiku workshop, held at the Museum of East Asian Art, often has up to ten amateurs eager to read their latest poetry in German, a language of long words where it can often be a squeeze to distill an idea into such a brief poem.

Traditional Japanese haikus are supposed to be composed of just 17 syllables, arranged in three lines and including a "kigo": some word suggesting a season of the year.

A haiku does not rhyme, and it often draws attention to fleeting moments in nature like a plum petal falling on snow.

A typical haiku by classic author Issa is rendered in English as: my dear old village / every memory of home / pierces like a thorn.

Every child in Japan knows the centuries-old syllable pattern of 5-7-5. In other languages, the rules are often looser but the spirit of haiku remains.

"In German, you can't get as much content into 17 syllables as you might in English," explains Martin Berner, chairman of the Frankfurt-based German Haiku Society.

There are now haiku circles in several German cities, and according to Berner, there are haiku societies in more than 50 nations around the world.