From Jeff Edmunds <jhe2@psulias.psu.edu>:

For me the comparison of tongue to hot boiled strawberry is more tactile than visual, despite the similarities in size, color, and, as Jansy demonstrates with the image she sent to the list, shape. After all, in kissing, neither party sharing the tongue can see it, but both are keenly aware of its texture.

Footnote 10 of an ancient article on _Korol', dama, valet_ (KDV) and _King Queen Knave_ (KQK) reads:

The strawberry/tongue relationship may have bled into the English version of KDV from _Ada_, which Nabokov was composing at the same time he was revising KQK. In Chapter 17, Van and Ada are exchanging sloppy kisses: "'I can lend you my tongue,' she said, and did. A large boiled strawberry, still very hot."

The passage in the text of the article that refers to this footnote, which claims that "In more than one instance VN's revamping of _KDV_ seems overdone," cites as one example: "the simple and evocative 'frukt' whose lack at the station's sandwich stall Dreier bemoans [in the Russian version] is transformed into the absurdly overwrought 'nice, plump, lumpy, glossy red strawberries positively crying to be bitten into, all their achenes proclaiming their affinity with one's own tongue's papillae."

This passage of _KQK_ suggests to me that the origin and aptness of Nabokov's tongue/hot boiled strawberry metaphor is more tactile than visual, but of course as Jansy rightly points out, visually the metaphor works deftly.



At 11:00 PM 8/11/2005, you wrote:
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: don barton johnson
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2005 6:26 PM
Subject: a curious image

Dear Don,
 
Besides synesthesia, VN´s imagetic precision is astounding by the way he condensed different informations. 
I had always thought that the image of Ada´s tongue as hot and soft like a strawbery was sufficiently precise:
"‘I can lend you my tongue,’ she said, and did.A large boiled strawberry, still very hot. He sucked it in as far as it would go. He held her close and lapped her palate. Their chins got thoroughly wet".
 I had not thought that visually the tongue would also look very much like a strawberry! Today I found a picture in a magazine that amazed me and I thought that you might be interested in sharing it with me... Jansy