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.[1][2][3] 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 1930sof 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.