Where the heck is heben nuk?
Caution: spoilers ahead!
If you haven’t read Deception at the Diamond D Ranch yet, stop reading this article now and get yourself a copy here. The following discussion digs into one of the book’s central riddles. Since it’s a mystery, it’ll be far less interesting if you read this article first.
The Basque language, called Euskara, is one of the world’s oldest languages. It’s unique and a point of pride for people of Basque heritage. It also turned the mystery at the center of Deception at the Diamond D Ranch into a real-life mystery.
‘The Legends of the Tartaro’ led me astray
“The Legends of the Tartaro” are a section of an old book called Basque Legends. Published in London in 1879, “The Legends of the Tartaro” section details five old Basque stories, passed down through the oral tradition, that focus on a giant one-eyed monster.
When I found these old legends, I was smitten by the idea that near-identical stories had emerged from the oral traditions of multiple cultures around the world. Arguably, the most well-known is Greek and comes from Homer’s The Odyssey, but there are similar cyclops stories from Persia, the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia, and maybe others I don’t know about.
The version of the Tataro story that captured my imagination best was short, easy to understand, had striking similarities to Homer’s story about Polyphemus and Odysseus, and it included a short phrase, Heben Nuk, as part of the story’s climax of events. In brackets next to the foreign phrase was a short translation: “Thou Hast Me Here.” I assumed it was Basque.
The phrase had appeal because it was a real-life mystery that few modern people could ever solve, so I stitched Heben Nuk into my manuscript. In fact, the earliest drafts going back four or five years include this mysterious phrase.
I thought I was pretty clever, putting a real mystery at the center of my fictional mystery. Fast forward a few years.
Basque advisors proof-read my work
I’d successfully pitched the novel to my publisher and had already gone through several rounds of editing. As a final step in what amounted to a nine-month process, my editor agreed to let me circulate the book to folks at the Basque Museum & Cultural Center—an organization staffed by Basques who study Basque culture, language and dance—to vet the work.
Most importantly, I wanted to make sure the people who worked tirelessly to preserve and celebrate Basque culture in Idaho weren’t offended that I’d built a fictional story on a property they own and manage. Second, I hoped they’d fact check the ways I portrayed Basque history and language, which I wanted to be true-to-life in the book.
A number of edits resulted, but most notably, there was something wrong with the phrase at the center of my mystery. None of the Basque language speakers who reviewed my manuscript had ever heard of the phrase, Heben Nuk.
What I know about Basque language is limited, but here’s the gist of what I learned throughout the course of writing my mystery.
The Basque language, Euskara, is unlike any other language in the world.
Euskara was passed down by oral tradition for thousands of years.
The Basque country spans seven geographically unique provinces, and the Basque language varied historically from province to province. It’s kind of like the way southern English in Tennessee is different from northern English in Pennsylvania. For the Basque language, though, these phonetic roots go back many thousands of years.
Standardized Basque language, called Batua, wasn’t formalized until 1968, extremely recent on the culture’s overall timeline and 89 years after the book that was my source information was published.
In standardized Basque, the phrase “I am here” would be translated Hemen Nago.
According to the half dozen folks at the Basque Museum who helped work on this, a Basque sheepherder likely would have written: Emen nauz. Someone with more education who came from Bizkaia, the province where the majority of Boise’s Basques are from, would have written: Emen nago.
“No one that we know would recognize Heben Nuk,” they told me in an email.
So it’s a real-life mystery. The Basque speakers who reviewed my manuscript theorize it came from the north side of the Pyrenees at a time before the Basque language was formalized.
My ultimate solution for the novel was for the phrase to be as much a mystery to my Basque characters as it was to anybody else, and those characters guess at the meaning in the same fashion that my Basque advisors did. While the point may be irrelevant to non-Basque speakers, it’s probably a big deal to people who know, understand and have studied Euskara.
For those interested in reading more, here’s a link to a great article in BBC about the Basque language.
References
Vinson, Julien., Webster, Wentworth. Basque Legends. United Kingdom: Griffith and Farran, 1877.