I’m in love with people’s hands and the way they clench their fists and the way their fingertips lightly press down onto piano keys or thighs. Calloused fingers or dainty fingers. Hands writing poems or memos or parking tickets. Hands writing futures. To me, every crease on the palm is a love line. 

(The second video is the first ever recording of the song, all the way back to 1946)

Some time ago I sent the first video to @mesogeios and promised to translate it at some point, so here is my attempt to it)

“The pumpkin Seed”

 The things you say, I take them in “credit”

Your fairytales have now blossomed through me

And I have realised that for you I was

Your pumpkin seed to pass the time.

I find your every kiss more bitter

And my sorrow you can not sweeten

You come with me conniving youth

Why do you look for someone else to play with?

Leave then, since you seek to go elsewhere

Stop the whimpering and the crying 

And when you join the man you love

Tell him not that you had me as pumpkin seed.

Notes: In Greece - and I am guessing in other countries too - pumpkin seed is edible and we eat it like peanuts, etc. The phrase “to regard someone as pumpkin seed” means to have somebody to pass the time, to battle boredom. So here the singer is complaining that his lover had him as a love to pass her time until she finds another.

Also interesting fact that the song though written from a male perspective it is often sung by women.

In the original lyrics it does not say “the man you love” but “the magkas that you love.” Magkas in greek slang (especially in rembetiko) has a very specific meaning. It was used between the people of the lower class, signifying that a man had honour and was brave - and it became linked with being weary or hostile towards authority. Over the time it has come to signify someone who is a daredevil or who is acting tough. All in all it’s a word with an intricate meaning that is a bit hard to explain without the context it was born in.

“The things you say, I take them in credit”: here I translated it a bit literally. The translation of the phrase “to buy something in credit” ie not giving money, but rather “noting it down” - a common practice in the old days in small shops in the neighborhood when someone did not have money in that moment and would pay back later - is in the greek slang “verese”. When we say that we hear someone’s talk as “verese” it indicates that we take them as words in credit, ie words that unlikely to be backed up/fullfiled by actions. To put it simply, we take it as bullshit.

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