Sentence parsing problem

Question

A sentence describing a troll from Harry Potter:

背が四メーテルもあり、墓石のような鈍い灰色の肌、岩石のようにゴツゴツのずんぐりした巨体、ハゲた頭は小さく、ココナッツがちょこんと載っているようだ。(Japanese TL)
Twelve feet tall, its skin was a dull, granite grey, its great lumpy body like a boulder with its small bald head perched on top like a coconut. (Original English)

I'm unconvinced by the part in bold. I read this as "Its bald head was small and seemed to have a coconut perched on top of it". That is to say, the Japanese sentence sounds to me like there is a coconut on the troll's head, whereas the English sentence compares the head with a coconut. At best, if I assume the topic is still the troll and not ハゲた頭, the troll has both a head and a coconut.

Am I making a parsing error, or is this just one of those terrible sentences that this book's translation is notorious for?

Answer 1

I feel like the topic of the sentence is 巨体. Everything else is explaining what the nature of this body is.

I am not reading 頭は as marking the topic but rather as a contrastive は.

Consider everything else about the body: it's four meters tall, everything is built like stone, 岩石, which doesn't sound particularly triffling. The troll's body is huge.

But his head, well his head stands out exactly because its size contrasts so drastically with everything else.

Now consider these two words that appear as the head is described: 小さく and ちょこんと. The small nature of the head is certainly being contrastively emphasized by these words alone.

Even though coconuts can be somewhat big, on a four meter tall troll, a coconut would look quite small. And a coconut is the right shape for a head.

If I were to disregard the original English and try a translation from the Japanese, I would parse it something like,

But the head! It was small. Like a coconut sitting daintily atop [his body].

And while "but" might be a bit of a flourish, I'm using it to capture what I feel the nuance of は (in 頭は) suggests.

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My sense is that the original sentence is told is the casual way of a story teller. But, we could add back in the parts omitted.

背が四メーテルもあり、
墓石のような鈍い灰色の肌もあり、
岩石のようにゴツゴツのずんぐりした巨体もあった。
ハゲた頭は小さく、
ココナッツがちょこんと載っているようだ。