Mika Häkkinen's "Rapid Dragon"
http://www.iltalehti.fi/2005/06/28/3219321_vi.jpg
Several readers from Finland have sent me photos and news links about Formula One driver Mika Häkkinen's tattoo. Since I don't understand Finnish, a reader has paraphrased the article for me. If someone would please translate the article into English, I would be greatly appreciate it.
Basically the paper was not able to tell what it says, they have contacted several tattoo artists and no one seems to know the answer.
The characters appeared on the left side of the photograph is 龍, which means "dragon". Although the character is recognizable, it is missing a small horizontal stroke in the right half partial. On the left half of the character, 立 and 月 are not suppose to be connected together.
The second character 捷 is written correctly and it means "victory; triumph; quick; prompt; rapid".
Since I don't know which direction the two characters are suppose to be read as, the phrase could be "triumph dragon", or "rapid dragon", perhaps "speedy dragon".
Update: Reader PöRRö has roughly translated the newspaper's article from Finnish to English:
The tattoo decorating Mika Häkkinens arm inspired our readers to try to find out what it means.
Iltalehti wrote tuesday about Mika Häkkinens new tattoo. His right arm decorating chinese marks got our readers attention (to translate them).
Iltalehti- newspapers editor enquired the issue from several Japanese people on Helsinki. They claimed that the marks were chinese. Finally one chinese person was able to affirm that, but the later marks did not easily translate to Finland.
Now our readers tell their own guess.
The arm reads litterarily as "dragon kings old hometown" says Ossi from Tokyo.
In Japan Mika Häkkinen is know by everyone who know anything about forumula. Locals here have been astonished to hear that Mika has Kanji marks on his hand Ossi continues.
Kim has translated the marks with his japanese friend and he too thinks the first marks mean dragon. Later ones mean quick.
Quick dragon strongly hints that Mika sure knows what is written into his arm, Kim continues.
Hobo thinks that dragon does not appear in the arm at all. In his opinion the marks mean sovereign/monarch and winner. Hobo intrepts the meaning of kanji marks as "world champion".
posted by tian at
1:32 AM
16 Comments:
His name is Häkinnen, by the way. Your “a” is missing two upper strokes ;-).
I'm going to get a tatoo in some arse-dumb english like "guilty as served" it's gonna be awesome.
I was under the impression that 捷 as an adjective means "rapid" (捷運: rapid transit; 捷足先登: the fleet-footed arrive first; 捷徑: shortcut). Could it be that the characters are meant to be read right to left, in which case they would mean "rapid dragon"?
Otherwise, left-to-right it seems to mean "dragon victory".
it is rapid dragon,
as it only makes sense if one read from right to left (in taiwan today and before 1949 all chinese do read from top to bottom AND right to left.)
rapid dragon is a kind of dinosaur, maybe velociraptor?
Agree on the assessment of "rapid dragon"--"捷徑" was exactly the term I was going to bring up prior to reading the comments. In fact, the expanded definitions at Unicode.org lists "捷" as "victory; triumph; quick; prompt; rapid."
Given that Häkkinen is an F1 driver, it seems fitting that he would get a tattoo relating to speed.
Ossi took 捷 as 棲. 棲 means "home".
I think 龍捷 is read from right to left. it exactly means "rapid dragon".
It's surprising (to me at least), that there is so much ambiguity about the meaning of the characters.
Anyway, I found this dragon sticker set in an AutoZone store. One would expect that a character that comes with a picture of a dragon would mean "dragon", but the character looks nothing like the dragon character in your article. What does it mean?
The character on that dragon sticker set is 悪. It means "evil" or "bad". It's also the same character from the evil handbag that appeared in this blog some weeks ago.
Thanks. I suspected I had seen it somewhere before but couldn't quite remember it. It's worn on the back of Sanosuke Sagara of "Rurouni Kenshin". In the English version, they translate it as "bad".
regarding Sun Bin's comment...How are dinosaur names written in chinese texts? do they just print the Latin names in roman characters, transliterate, or use chinese characters with the same meaning as teh Latin names?
Häkinnen's nickname when he was racing was "The Flying Finn". I wonder if that's what he was going for?
Xenobiologista: In general, dinosaur names use words similar in meaning to (at least the first half of) the names in Latin, and typically end with 龍 as part of the name. Which, in the case of dinosaur names, is basically the equivalent to "sauros."
I'm pretty sure the little dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that chased the characters around inside the buildings (which were supposed to be velociraptors) are called 捷龍 in Chinese.
Another example is the tyrannosaurus rex, which are called 暴龍 in Chinese. Meanwhile, dinosaur is written as 恐龍.
Um, I'm pretty sure that the 立 and 月 do connect to each other when the character is written in seal style (and maybe some other styles too).
His name is Häkkinen, not Häkinnen. :)
I'm glad his tattoo doesn't mean something completely stupid, like some other finnish popular characters' tattoo. She tattooed "There were is mill, there is a road" on her stomach, which is of course wrong. Nice try though...
What I wonder about is what on earth that 'Hobo' is thinking. Monarch is a totally different kanji combination (君主). There is only one single kanji word for monarch which is 王，which is probably familiar for all you shogi players and does not at all resemble 龍.
Check out this blog that's kind of about Hakkinen. It's called Haus of Hakkinen:
http://hakkinenhaus.blogspot.com/
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