Paul Păun (September 5, 1915 – April 9, 1994), born Zaharia Herșcovici and who later in life changed his legal name to Zaharia Zaharia, also signed his work Paul Paon and Paul Paon Zaharia. He was a Romanian and Israeli avant-garde poet and visual artist, who wrote in Romanian and French and produced surrealist and abstract drawings. He was also a medical doctor and surgeon. His work is registered with the ADAGP (Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques) and the SGDL (Société des Gens de Lettres). Inspired in his youth by the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin and by the Romanian avant-garde magazine unu, he was a co-founder in the early 1930s of the magazines Alge and Viața Imediată. Păun set himself the goal of making poetry a living experience. He experimented briefly with licentious, ludic themes (and was thus prosecuted for pornography) before turning to Marxism and proletkult aesthetics. Like other avant-garde writers, including his friends Gherasim Luca and Dolfi Trost, he adhered to the then-illegal Romanian Communist Party. Păun soon developed an interest in surrealism, and became a member of the surrealist group formed at the very start of World War II (alongside Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum, Trost, and Virgil Teodorescu). This small community survived clandestinely during the war years, when Păun himself was marginalized due to his Jewish ethnicity. It reemerged as a short-lived but very active group after the war, with many of their collective works written in French. Păun also had at the time a noted debut as a surrealist painter and illustrator. Like other artists and intellectuals in Romania and elsewhere, he found himself disenchanted with Stalinism already in the late 1930s, and subsequently with the post-war Romanian communist regime. Exposed to communist censorship, he stopped publishing or exhibiting his work. He emigrated to Israel when he was already in his late forties, and focused on his medical career, with occasional public contributions to art and literature.
Biography
Debut years Păun (whose pseudonym is the Romanian for "peacock") was a native of Bucharest. Both his parents were Jewish. The poet's paternal grandfather, Zaharia, was an observant Jew from the Russian Empire who had escaped the draft and was living incognito in Romania; his first name was passed on to his grandson, Zaharia. The family was registered as Herșcovici, which was Păun's first official surname. Păun, his parents, and his older sister Nini lived in a suburb area just south of Dealul Mitropoliei. Nini was in school with another young Jewish future poet, Maria Banuș, who soon became affectionate friends, and one-time lovers, with Păun (whom she called Pepe, Bebe, or Bebică). In 1932, Banuș described him as: "The solitary, tormented, poseur, rebellious, ironic boy of 17, with his mouth demanding like that of a little girl (Nini's mouth), a large nose, round eyes with overgrown eyelashes, bohemian hair, [and] open-necked shirts". She noted that his family was well educated and spoke French at home, where they maintained a "beautiful atmosphere", and that Păun himself was a good mandolin player. While still a high school student, at around age 15, Păun, together with Aurel Baranga, Sesto Pals, and Gherasim Luca, approached the more senior avant-garde writers at unu. As unu editor Sașa Pană recalled: "Because we didn't want them to look like an epigone annex of ours, for they were indeed talented, daring and nonconformist, we advised them to put out a magazine of their own and, once they established their reputation, we were to invite them over at unu." This led the youth to inaugurate, in September 1930, the magazine Alge ("Algae"), together with painter S. Perahim, who gave it its visual dimension. According to Swedish researcher Tom Sandqvist, the Alge group was already receiving its cultural inspiration from surrealism and Dada, "favoring more or less absurd puns and provocative, violent gestures". Scholar Giovanni Magliocco summarizes Alge-ist philosophy as "a still-embryonic kind of 'surrealism', incendiary and iconoclastic, [...] a literary extremism, verbally violent and delirious, but still confused as far as programs go". Păun was probably the last to actually publish in Alge (starting with its 6th issue), which hosted some of his earliest work: a selection of strange, often erotic poetry. It includes "Poem cu părul meu sălbatic" (Poem with My Wild Hair), "Poem de dimineaţă" (Morning Poem), "Voi oameni picaturi de otravă" (You Poison-Drop Men). As argued in 2001 by literary historian Ovid Crohmălniceanu, these works, which also embrace social critique, "no longer shock, and their value, such as it is, transcends aesthetics." In October 1931, Păun was also a contributor to the Alge supplement provocatively titled Pulă ("Cock"), with a poem that referred to the ruling class as "shit". The establishment was clamping down on the literary avant-garde, accusing it of pornography: Păun was in the audience as a court tried and acquitted the pioneer surrealist Geo Bogza (November 28, 1932), whom Păun had befriended in October 1931. Păun was enthusiastic about Bogza's search for an anti-art, prosaic poetry, as he explained in a letter to Banuș: "what do [the Alge writers] want, after all? They are sick to their stomachs, to their tongues, after all the sweets they have been fed by the poets. By those who go for things of beauty, not things of experience [Păun's emphasis]. [...] We write because life leaves us hopeless". In his search for an "original" format, Păun even rejected being labeled a "modernist", "because a modernist can be allowed not to be a modernist". Some tensions between the unu and Alge groups were already evident: the latter for a while boycotted unu, because it had refused to publish one of Luca's texts in extenso. Pană referred to the other Alge supplement, titled Muci (Snot), as "pornography ... but not devoid of a certain humor."
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