Alexandre Vialatte’s (1901-1971) self-proclaimed label – ‘notoirement méconnu’ – continues to define him today. The writer-translator’s incongruities have relegated him to the margins of the French literary canon yet paradoxically attract a modest academic following. His first novel Battling le ténébreux ou la mue périlleuse (1928) – a little-studied and currently untranslated coming of age tale – exemplifies the rich placelessness that defines the author. This thesis contextualises Battling in light of Vialatte’s position as translator. It suggests the text is informed by an uneasy encounter between French and German cultures and geographies and, in parallel, it investigates the very notion of an identity ‘in translation’. This thesis adopts a translational approach whereby my own process translating Battling into English frames a literary study of the text. Given the multifaceted nature of translation, such an approach is interdisciplinary: it draws not only from translation studies (both theory and practice), but also from comparative literature, creative writing, and feminist studies, to map a polyphonous and multifaceted space between subjects and cultures. The analysis centres on the modernist hero’s ‘mue périlleuse’, or coming of age, and structures itself around two intersubjective encounters; as Vialatte’s protagonist meets his foreign and feminine Other to find insecurity, translator meets writer to problematise the original text. Through these two encounters, this thesis works to unsettle the binaries of self and other, original and translation, to ultimately present a plural and ethical identity in translation.