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English translation of the lyrics for meaning and comprehension
In one stone wall
two windows are held captive
two tired ones, two lonely ones
one of them you, one of them me
The wall is stone, and it is black
stone that is cold and hard, granite
it has put a lock of silence
on our tired lips
We cannot stir
under the weight of the wall
all of the love between you and me
is a story, the story of the wall
There has always been a distance
between your hands and mine
with this same bitterness have passed
your nights and days and mine
There is no long road between us
but even this is too much
the only bond between you and me
is the kind hand of the wind
We must stay captive
we are alive as long as we are captive
for us, release is death
the moment we are freed, we die
If only this wall would fall
and you and I would die together
in another world
take each other's hands
Maybe there, inside hearts,
there is no pain of loathing
and between their windows
there is no longer a wall
Words
Cultural Notes
Do Panjereh, Two Windows, stays inside one image. Two windows are set in a wall of black granite; the wall locks their lips, its weight keeps them from moving, and the only thing that passes between them is the wind. Then it turns: they must stay captive, because they are alive only while they are captive, and release would be death. The last wish is for the wall to fall, and for another world where between windows there are no walls.
Ardalan Sarfaraz has written that the windows were real. In 1969, newly arrived in Tehran from the countryside, he sat one night in a café at the corner of Malek Street and the old Shemiran road, and across the street, in a building close to falling down, two old windows stood side by side, near each other and, as he put it, leagues and years apart. He wrote the song there before the night was out and never changed a word; in his telling the two windows said the poem and he wrote it down. He counts it, with Mordab and Ghalandar, among his songs with a Sufi cast.
He gave the poem to Hassan Shamaizadeh with a few others before a journey, and Varoujan arranged it twice, once for Googoosh and once for Fereydoun Foroughi, whose recording was never released. Googoosh's came out in 1972, one of the seventeen songs she, Sarfaraz and Shamaizadeh made together in that decade. Varoujan died in Tehran in 1977, at forty. Shamaizadeh left Iran in February 1979, days after the revolution, and Sarfaraz in the years after it. Googoosh stayed in Iran and did not sing in public for twenty-one years, until she left in 2000. In 2017 Googoosh, Sarfaraz and Shamaizadeh went on the road together again, as the Memory Makers.
People behind the song
Meet the artists and writers whose voices shape this song.
