[2] Tanka consist of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with a pattern of 5-7-5-7-7 sounds (onji is an inaccurate term for this).
[6] The earliest work of Japanese literature to be translated into English was the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a collection of waka compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in the 13th century.
Frederick Victor Dickins (1835-1915), a medical officer in the Royal Navy, translated and published the work anonymously in the March 1865 issue of the Chinese and Japanese Repository.
The first North American collection containing tanka in English written by a person not of Japanese descent was Blue Is the Iris by Eleanor Chaney Grubb, 1949.
[citation needed] These efforts apparently began immediately after the poets were released from internment camps in Canada and the United States.
[8] A notable American translator and writer of tanka was Lucille Nixon, who in 1957 became the first foreigner selected to participate in the Utakai Hajime, the Imperial New Year's Poetry Reading of Japan.
In 1972, the Kisaragi Poem Study Group's Maple: poetry by Japanese Canadians with English translation appeared, a collection like Sounds of the Unknown.
The Tanka Chapter of the Chaparral Poets of California was operating in the early 1960s, as mentioned in the Introduction to Sounds from the Unknown (1963), but it is not known whether it published a journal.
The Tanka Society of America was founded by Michael Dylan Welch and its inaugural meeting was held in April 2000 in Decatur, Illinois.