Dang Thi Hanh - "The Girl Who Watched the Rain" over time

Associate Professor, Meritorious Teacher Dang Thi Hanh/Photo: Thanh Long

1.In the early 80s of the last century, I got to know Ms. Dang Thi Hanh when I was first accepted to work at the Department. At that time, it was called the organizationForeign literature. Before that, she also taught my older brother in high school. It was also through my older brother that I learned more about her family. Based on her education, serious and straightforward personality inherited from family tradition, combined with her carefulness in academics, she had a solid and certain expertise in French literature.

2.Since her retirement, she has rarely appeared or moved around, not until now when she is 85 years old. Opening of the MemoirsThe girl looked at the rain,She wrote: “I was born in Hue, in a very memorable year, 1930. But the earliest memory of my childhood, that is, of myself, is located in a village in Nghe An”. She was thin, looked austere, but in fact, she was an artist in her view of life and people; a sympathetic soul. She was radiant, laughed loudly, and was innocent when her articles were published in newspapers.Artsor even in a magazine whose name sounds strange to literature in the South. It is understandable: because those are the brainchildren born from academic caution, understanding of life, quietly, but with much pity and emotion. That governs her writing style, grammar, and word usage. Anyone who has ever interacted with her can see that she is not an eloquent person. On the contrary, sometimes it seems that her language cannot keep up with her train of thought, - at those times she becomes stumbling, but not confused. Sitting in the thesis evaluation council (in the past when she was still working) or occasionally in recent years, she has agreed to accept criticism for a few theses or dissertations, listening attentively, we also learn many things that sometimes we have to read for months or years to absorb. Those are issues of literary theory or comments on the art of a certain writer. That stumbling, I think, is the very richness, the abundance, sometimes “unconsciously” appearing in sentences that seem grammatically incorrect. Her handwriting is beautiful in the old style, easy to read, but sometimes it is also “curved”, fluttering with arrows pointing to the margins at the places added due to the previous “stumble” before the thought was arranged. And, unlike speaking, her writing when printed is soft but sharp, echoing the experiences, knowledge, sometimes quite humorous, fresh.

Photo: Jackie Chan

3.She was a disciplined, exemplary teacher, but also a kind person in her outlook and thoughts about life. Unfortunately, she did not write much. Perhaps, partly because she was too thoughtful and afraid to touch; partly because of her health. Her eyes were not good, and she had to have surgery several times. She wrote slowly, but attractively. I liked her Memories of her childhood, her homeland, and the people - from street vendors to famous people. Those were really good pages of writing.Grandma and grandchildis a memory of two childhood worlds separated by more than half a century, written in a humorous, lyrical style close to literary works. A writer once said, "the bite of time" does not spare anyone. The lyrical and philosophical contemplations about life, about the fates of countless loved ones, are soft and gentle like that through each page of memories in the fading of time, retained by haunting lines of writing. Those are spaces of reminiscence about innocent, gentle dreams, and passionate memories. Finding the lost space in Dang Thi Hanh's creations has modernized the ruins of memories that time has eroded and erased in many others. Memories have been given and received on the foundation of oblivion, of the dust of human time. And the memories here, with much poetry, "seem much closer to oblivion than what is called memories". Memories and forgetfulness pile up... Only a look remains, a beautiful, clear and sad light. A poem about lost days... She is not a professional writer in the sense of writing based on fiction but a "historian" based on personal, family and clan memories. But the beauty lies in the poetry of truth, of reality that has been tasted and contemplated.

Associate Professor, Meritorious Artist Dang Thi Hanh took a souvenir photo with the Ambassador of the French RepublicJean-Noël Poirier and teachers of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, on the occasion of herFrench Government awarded the Order of Academic Palms, February 2013/ Photo: Jackie Chan

4.Her remaining works today and perhaps in the future, in addition to a considerable number of translations and articles published in specialized newspapers and magazines, are articles in the Textbook.History of French literature, is a treatiseHugo's Novelor bookSome faces of 20th century French prose,very good and profound. With Hugo, we are familiar, but reading her essay, that familiarity becomes strange. She analyzes almost the entire creative journey of this writer's important prose works. Each of Hugo's works is examined by her under the light of narrative theory, structure, looking for and discovering things that are truly attractive and convincing. She applies the theory of rhythm, structure, narrator, voice, time, space... to her very convincing analysis of Hugo's novels. Each of those articles is a work, a creation from creation. Like next to a stone Notre Dame Cathedral, there is also aNotre Dame Cathedralpaper – Hugo's immortal novel.

5.Each writing is a dialogue with oneself, with everyone, with the times. What remains after a life can be a large fortune, or nothing, or a great title, but I think the luckiest thing is to leave behind good pages of books, where future generations will read the feelings, joys, worries, joys, sorrows, knowledge from life and books, and unfinished dialogues, for future generations to continue writing. In the memoirGrandma and grandchildHers has a very poignant sentence: “Just because everything in this world, without exception, must rise and fall with Time: just like that, the face of things in this world changes, the centers of kingdoms, the land registers of enterprises”.

Only a memory, a love remains, as the sentence seems to suggest.