This song took its inspiration from a poem by the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The title of the original poem is usually translated into English as 'Little Viennese Waltz'. As always with poems, it is difficult to translate the full sense, but if you click here you can find several English versions as well as the full original Spanish text. The poem was originally published in a collection of which the translated title was 'Poets of New York', a title Cohen also gave to an album of his own.
Lorca was one of Leonard Cohen's favourite poets and influenced his writing a good deal. If you look at the lyrics of Cohen's poem Take this Waltz you can see how similar they are, in fact Cohen's song is best described as a loose translation of Lorca's verses.
Since both poems were written a film has also been relased with the title Take This Waltz, in 2011, inspired by the Cohen song.