Max Porter on publishing The Vegetarian: 'Everyone agreed that this was an important book'

In April 2013, when I was an editor at Granta and Portobello Books, I sat on a panel at London Book Fair to discuss how translators can best communicate with publishers and ‘make their work matter’. I was very inexperienced, was not and never will be an expert in literary translation publishing, but I had noticed that various barriers, mystifications and outdated structural impediments were preventing translators from reaching editors. I said that if a translator – based on an accurate appraisal of what I was acquiring, reading, or supporting elsewhere – thought I’d like a book, then they should send me a sample. At the end of the event, a person called Deborah Smith walked over and handed me seven pages of her translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.  

It wasn’t a new book; it had come out in Korea in 2007 and been a success. It wasn’t the first time it had been sent to Anglophone publishers; Ms Han’s US agent at the time had submitted a different sample, by a different translator, to multiple publishers over several years. I didn’t know any of this. I was just reading a story about a woman who stopped eating meat. A woman who thought she was turning into a plant. It was unforgettable. It was terrifying, shocking, elegant, radical and beautiful, so we – the team at Portobello books – set about acquiring it and commissioning Deborah to do a full translation.  

I remember having to fight a little bit, but not much, at acquisition stage. Everyone agreed the sample was extraordinary, that this was an important book. Some felt it was too strange a prospect to be commercially viable. Music to my ears. Everyone agreed it was highly unusual that Deborah didn’t speak Korean and had taught herself to translate the language only three years earlier. We did as much research as we could about the book and its reception, as well as Han Kang’s other works, and decided it was exactly the kind of book an independent publisher like us should be bringing to readers. Deborah’s translation-in-progress was hugely accomplished, fluent and atmospheric. It had a visceral immediacy and dazed musicality that wasn’t like anything else. 

We also spent a longer time than usual discussing the format and cover design for The Vegetarian. We wanted it to be affordable and accessible. We wanted to avoid cultural stereotypes or obvious market signifiers of translated fiction. We didn’t want the fact it was a Korean novel to carry more weight than the fact it was a staggeringly good novel, and we wanted it to look fresh and challenging and unlike the comparison titles an algorithm might throw up. All of us felt we should avoid lazy, generic (or worse Orientalist) imagery on the cover of the book. No blossom! No watercolour Seoye lettering. No image library beautiful Korean woman merging with a painted screen. We wanted it to pack a punch. It is a novel built of haunting and disturbing images and we didn’t want to shy away from that. Some people argued that our initial cover went a little bit too far in the grotesque direction (a digitally rendered shock of pink and white lilies concealing a bloody steak, a finger, and an eyeball) but I thought it was tremendous. It came from the uncanny, disturbing psychosexual world of the book. I argued that book covers can be transgressive and surprising just as book interiors are. The paperback’s severed wing design the following year was less disturbing, more beautiful, which was lucky given it was about to find hundreds of thousands of readers.  

Portobello Books (which ceased to exist in 2018 and became part of Granta Books) in those days was a very collaborative and happy team; we talked a lot. We sat round a table looking at hundreds of variations of the cover with different type, different layouts. We talked so much about the copy for the book cover, how we should describe it, what we should and shouldn’t say. We did this work for every book but for The Vegetarian we felt we had to get it right, it couldn’t disappear, it needed to find readers. It especially needed to find readers who might have felt that translated literature was not for them. Those people the International Booker-shortlisted translator Anton Hur recently described in an article on the Booker Prizes website, for whom ‘the words “translated literature” are used to conjure up dead European men writing about wars, bourgeois families and modernism’. 

The events of 2016 are blurred in my memory but the book found enthusiastic early readers, got amazing reviews, then it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, then shortlisted, then it won and we were all at the dinner and it was dizzying and emotional and Korean journalists descended and Kang and Deborah were swept up in a life-changing storm, the effects of which were sometimes deeply alarming, sometimes straightforwardly wonderful.  

She has written spectacularly well on the politics of translation, and her translation of The Vegetarian specifically. (For anyone wishing to explore this subject more fully, books such as Sophie Collins’ Currently & Emotion: Translations, David Bellos’ Is That a fish in Your Ear, Daniel Hahn’s Catching Fire and Kate Briggs’ This Little Art have brought the complexity and importance of translation to the fore.) 

Deborah also used her share of the International Booker Prize winners’ fee to start Tilted Axis Press, an imprint which has radically changed the face of literary publishing in the UK and continues to examine, challenge, diversify and expand the activities we associate with literary translation, as well as having a jaw-dropping hit rate in terms of excellent books and excellent translations. I admire her so, so much. For her adventure into translation, for her every weighted word choice, and for the way she has used her platform and her time.  

Han Kang and I have spoken often of trust. The trust economy of handing your work into another language, to a stranger, to a distant ear. Trusting people to take your heart work, your careful, exacting language machine, and turn it into a product. Winning the International Booker Prize in 2016 necessarily meant a loss of control and a huge amount of exposure and attention on her person and her writing. It’s been extraordinary to see her regain that control, finding herself in the work, in books, in the city she lives in, in her dedication to voice and style. Her work has always concerned itself with how to reconcile human violence with human compassion, as individuals, family members, or nation-states. The depth of this investigation, and the global scale of her audience after winning the International Booker Prize, makes her a truly inspiring and important writer.