At 82 years old and a life full of accomplishments behind him, Leonard Cohen passed away, he already knew that his heart would stop at any time, in one of the last interviews with The New Yorker he said he was ready to die and that all he asked for was to have enough time to finish the work he had started.
Last year we learned that the Swedish academy had awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, and some complained, not without reason, because if anyone merged poetry and music, it was Cohen. If anyone deserved an award like this for his words, without belittling Dylan, it was Leonard. Today, when his heart no longer beats, we, who had the opportunity to enjoy his art, thought it would have been a beautiful and deserved homage.
In this small space, now saddened by his departure, we want to pay tribute to him.
A Canadian by birth and lorca’s admirer by choice, he evokes in his texts topics such as sexuality, religion, politics or isolation, but above all his messages speak of love. A feeling that in her words appears as sensual, erotic and perched on the naked body of the woman. In the love of your words there is no pain for loss, on the contrary, it is a love that heals and heals.
If his first steps were with acoustic guitar, the encounter with a Spanish guitarist made him fall in love with the chords that could come out of the classical guitar. Another reference from you was Layton, what did you mention?I taught him how to dress, he taught me to live forever.
After leaving behind a college experience in New York, which he didn’t like very much, he called it “a meatless passion, a love without climax,” he returned to Canada, specifically to Montreal, where he mixed poetry with others. activities that, at that time, allowed him to live financially.
A tireless traveller, he met the one who would be the love of his life in Hydra, in the Aegean Sea, Marianne Ihlen had just separated from the then Norwegian Axel Jensen, with whom he had a son. in a grocery store in Hydra Harbor when a stranger moved, inviting her to join her friends, was Leonard Cohen and there began a passionate romance that will last, between ups and downs, seven years.
In fact, until later, Marianne, who originally had the title Come on, Marianne, pretended to be an invitation from the singer to try again. A love that would never end, as deep as what I felt through words, whether through literature, poetry or music.
Marianne died in July last year of leukemia and left a void that he could never or tried to fill. “As long as you know I’m so close to you, that if you get close, I think you’ll get to mine,” Cohen wrote. in a letter dedicated to the woman of his life.
When he received the Prince of Asturias Prize (2011), he left us a speech that was engraved on all lovers of poetry. Cohen, in his elegant attire and cross smile, using the calm tone that identifies life, said the rewards he had. received for his work as a poet were somewhat misleading.
Because? He thought that it was poetry that helped him and that, therefore, it was something he did not master, in this regard, he stated, with particular irony, that if he knew where he was he would look more for his company. Then, in part, he felt like a charlatan for receiving an award in which he saw the natural, not the merit.
With merit or not, what is clear is that his work is indisputable and his quality as an author was a gift we all received. In this brief speech, he also stated that he had a Spanish guitar for more than 40 years and felt the desire to feel it before leaving for Spain. He also reported that when he felt it, he felt that the wood would never die.
He, with his work, with his genius, guaranteed to be the wood that will never die in our hearts.