Prose Style Concern

[MSadiq]

This is one situation where English doesn't really cut the mustard. In Swedish you'd say "nära döding" to mean a nearly corpse, although I would translate the sentence in keeping with the style and rythm of the prose to read "mannen föll liggandes till sitt yttersta". It's very difficult to get the style across in English...

I tried to communicate an Arabic phrase here, and the best way I thought of was "almost-corpse." It sounds a bit weird because it's more common for compounds like these to be a noun-noun compound, but this is an adverb-noun compound, and adverbs, usually, don't modify nouns.

That depends on what you mean by lace and how you're using the word. I would be aiming to use lace in the context lace cloth in any translation into Swedish, because that way I could use the word "spetsduk" to get both the violence and the image of the pattern of arrows across to the reader. So something along the lines of "ryggen en spetsduk av pilar". Note that this works because "spets" is also the Swedish word for a sharp point (as in arrowhead).

This is just a mistake on my part. I'm pretty sure my thought process was that lace can mean خرم when translated into Arabic, which means to prick, too, but, even though lacing includes the action or pricking, you're not leaving the needle in. So, I back-translated to prick and pin in my mind as to lace, which fits the scene of him look like an urchin, as if laced did mean to prick, you'd also imagine him as a pin cushion. So this is just first language interference.

I read that as a complex metaphor where the hatred in the eyes is such that the people doing the staring really want to hurt the man they're staring at. Not only are they staring daggers, they're so keen to hurt the man that they're lusting for blood with the desperation of a thirsty man in the desert. It works for me. But then I read it as a form of kennning and I've heard similar things in the Swedish folk tales my grandmother told me.

That's my exact intentions. I'm glad you got it exactly. Extended metaphors are common in Arabic. You'd use synecdoche, like referring to the people as eyes, as that's the most active part of the scene, then continue to personify them as eyes and attribute the people's actions and intentions to them through attributing them to the eyes.

Yes, I like the prose too. I like the rythm it has, it comes across as something you're tell an audience aloud.

As I said above, none of the paragraphs are part of the same text, except for the first two, which I should've made clearer than just adding double spacing between them
My idea for this paragraph is that a master/teacher figure is trying to inspire his protegee to have more confidence in himself, so the master adopts exaggerated walk and gestures. Chest drumming and beating is something you see in Arabic poetry and some times in real life, too. So when you have these actions paired with a backward strut while throwing his weight around, you can imagine how unbalanced his walk must be, but when you describe it as a gait, which is a deliberate walk, intended pace and manner, and add the context of pride to it, you can imagine him being balanced even in this exaggerated pose, which fits pride; he's not asking him to be arrogant. Just having pride himself.