J A Symonds The Sonnets of Michelangelo The Italian text with an English translation and introduction by J A Symonds.
About the Book: “The Translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets has been made from Signor Cesear Guasti’s edition of the autograph first given to the world on 1863. Based om a collation of the various manuscripts [reserved in the Casa Buonarroti at Florence with he Vatican and other Codices. IT adheres to the original orthography of Michelangelo and omits no fragment of his indubitable compositions. Signor Guasti prefaces the text he has so carefully prepared with a discourse  upon the poetry of Michelangelo and a description of the manuscripts. To the poems themselves he adds a prose paraphrase, and prints upon the same page with each composition the version published by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1623. 
Before the publication of this volume, all studies of Michelangelo’s poetry, all translations made of it, and all hypotheses deduced from the sculptor’s verse in explanation of this theory or his practice as an artist, were based upon the edition of 1623. “
 
Genre:  Poetry, Culture, Lifestyle 
Edition: First published in this edition in 1950 
Published:  Vision Press Ltd, Callard House, 74A Regent Street, London W1
ISBN: Pre ISBM numbering 
Size: 19 x 13cm
Pages:199 pages
 
Contents
Introduction
Sonnets
Notes Appendix
 
List of Illustrations (Plates) by Michelangelo.
Frontispiece The Heads of Three Women from the Sistine Chapel (Uffizi Gallery)
Running youth from The Battle of Cascina (British Museum)
Resurrection of a man from The Last judgement (British Museum) 
Head of a young woman from The Sistine Chapel (Royal Library at Windsor Castle)
Christ on the Cross with the Virgin and St John (Royal Library at Windsor Castle) 
 
CONDITION:
Dust Jacket: Overall good condition some scuffing and tearing to the edges, the spine is good no sun fade. Some yellowing to outer edges of fly leaves. Foxing to inside of dust jacket.  The image on the front page is from The Heads of Three Women from the Sistine Chapel (Uffizi Gallery) 
Covers: Green cloth covers are in good condition. Minor wear to outer edges.  
Binding: Tight 
Spine: Good. The title on spine shows some minor wear at extreme edges
Pages.  All pages complete. Overall in good condition bright and clean. 
Back Story and Biography.
“J A Symonds - John Addington Symonds was born in Clifton, Bristol in 1840. Considered a ‘sensitive’ child didn’t do sport at Harrow but from there went to Balliol College, Oxford in 1858 where he studied classics under Benjamin Jowett and later worked with Jowett on an English translation of Plato's Symposium.  Jowett was critical of Symonds's opinions on sexuality, but when Symonds was falsely accused of corrupting choirboys, Jowett supported him, despite his own equivocal views of the relation of Hellenism to contemporary legal and social issues that affected homosexuals. 
 In 1862 to Magdalen College, Oxford. He made friends with a C. G. H. Shorting, whom he took as a private pupil. When Symonds refused to help Shorting gain admission to Magdalen, the younger man wrote to school officials alleging "that I [Symonds] had supported him in his pursuit of the chorister Walter Thomas Goolden (1848–1901), that I shared his habits and was bent on the same path." Although Symonds was officially cleared of any wrongdoing, he suffered a breakdown from the stress and shortly thereafter left the university for Switzerland. “In Switzerland, he met Janet Catherine North (sister of botanical artist Marianne North, 1830–1890). They married at Hastings on 10 November 1864.[2] They settled in London and had four daughters: Janet (born 1865), Charlotte (born 1867), Margaret (Madge) (born 1869) and Katharine (born 1875; she was later honoured for her writing as Dame Katharine Furse). Edward Lear wrote "The Owl and the Pussycat" for the three-year-old Janet. “
In 1878 he translated the sonnets of Michealanglo.  Symonds also translated classical poetry on homoerotic themes and wrote poems drawing on ancient Greek imagery and language such as Eudiades, which has been called "the most famous of his homoerotic poems". While the taboos of Victorian England prevented Symonds from speaking openly about homosexuality, his works published for a general audience contained strong implications and some of the first direct references to male-male sexual love in English literature. For example, in "The Meeting of David and Jonathan", from 1878, Jonathan takes David "In his arms of strength / [and] in that kiss / Soul into soul was knit and bliss to bliss". The same year, his translations of Michelangelo's sonnets to the painter's beloved Tommaso Cavalieri restore the male pronouns which had been made female by previous editors. In November 2016, Symonds's homoerotic poem, 'The Song of the Swimmer', written in 1867, was published for the first time in the Times Literary Supplement. 
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