Parenting & Family Quote by Leonard Cohen

Cohen takes prayer out of the stained-glass realm and drops it into the messy work of language: imperfect, improvised, a little embarrassing. Calling prayer "translation" is a quiet demystification. It implies there is no pure, original version of the self that speaks directly to God or the universe; there is only the attempt to render what you feel into words that can carry it. Translation always involves loss, distortion, compromise. That is the point. Prayer, in Cohen's framing, isn't a hotline, it's a struggle with the limits of expression.

Then comes the sting: "A man translates himself into a child". Not innocence as virtue, but dependence as reality. Adults perform competence for a living; prayer punctures it. In private, the self regresses to the simplest posture: need. Cohen makes "asking for all there is" sound both grand and pathetic, the way real desire is. We don't pray for neatly itemized improvements; we pray for the whole impossible package - relief, meaning, repair, love, a life that makes sense.

The kicker is "a language he has barely mastered". It's not just theological humility; it's artistic humility, too. Cohen spent a career sanding sentences down to their most resonant grain, and still treated words as inadequate tools for the job. The subtext is that prayer and songwriting share a lineage: both are attempts to say the unsayable with borrowed vocabulary. If it feels clumsy, that clumsiness is the proof you're close to something honest.