Paul Celan's poem "Late and Deep" has been translated into English by John Felstiner and included in the collection Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. It is a relatively early work from the poet's career, originally published in 1952 in Poppy and Memory, as it was called in English. This poem is a disturbing one, dealing as it does with the recent memory of the Holocaust, of Jewish history through the ages, and of the constant pressure for conversion to Christianity that Jews have faced from ancient and medieval times up until the present. It is a poem that seems to affirm an oath or prayer but that ultimately undercuts its own promises. The poem is characterized by allusions to Christian and Jewish scripture and history, and it seems to beckon forward and backward, from the time of the Exodus from Egypt, up to the Holocaust, in a never-ending saga of oppression, faith, and the futility and the barrenness of that faith. Celan is a Jew, writing in the German language of his people's oppressors, but he is a Jew who has lost faith in a personal God, making this poem bitter in its renunciation of hope.