Latest Beautiful Family Sitting

The other man in my life...

This is a picture of Shah Abbas I, "the Great," the most important of the Safavid rulers of Persia. Read about him here. He lived between 1571 and 1629. The reason he is important to me is that for the last three years I have been working on a translation of a memoir written by a one García de Silva y Figueroa, an ambassador of Philip III of Spain, who was sent to Persia, and spent more time than he bargained for with the Shah. García was 60 when he accepted the assignment, and died fourteen years later while returning from Persia. That's right, this was his last job. Wouldn't it be great to send some of our modern politicians on a fourteen year assignment to the other side of the world, at the conclusion of which they die?

But I digress. I am drawing dangerously close to finishing my first revision of the translation. 437 single space 12-font pages. I'm starting to taste it. Right now His Excellency is heading back to India after an aborted attempt to sail back to Spain. This was in 1621. Unfortunately, he doesn't get to try to return again until 1624.