Dang Thi Hanh - "The Little Girl Watching the Rain"... has passed away!

Today, Associate Professor, Meritorious Teacher Dang Thi Hanh has left this world!
The emotional articles of generations of colleagues and students bring back many memories of the image of "a disciplined, exemplary teacher, but also a compassionate person in his outlook and thoughts about life".
The University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi would like to respectfully introduce to readers the article by Associate Professor, Dr. Dao Duy Hiep about Associate Professor, Meritorious Teacher Dang Thi Hanh with precious feelings!
  She is a disciplined, exemplary teacher, but also a compassionate person in her outlook and thoughts about life. She writes slowly, but attractively. I like her Memories of her childhood, her hometown, and the people - from street vendors to famous people. Those are really good pages of writing.
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 Foreign Literature Group. Before that, she also taught my older brother at the High School. It was also thanks to my older brother that I learned more about her family. Based on her academic background, serious and straightforward personality inherited from the 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. At the beginning of the book Memoirs of a Little Girl Looking at the Rain, she wrote: “I was born in Hue, in a very easy-to-remember year, 1930. But the most distant memory of my childhood, that is, of myself, is located in a village in Nghe An”. She is thin, looks austere, but in fact, she is an artist in her view of life and people; a sympathetic soul. She is radiant, laughs loudly, and is innocent when she has articles published in the Literature and Arts newspaper or even in a magazine whose name sounds strange to literature in the deep South. It is understandable: because those are her 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 stuttering, but not messy. Sitting on the thesis evaluation board (in the old days when she was still working) or occasionally in recent years, when she agrees to read and critique some theses or dissertations, listening attentively, we also learn many things that sometimes take 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 also "curved", fluttering with arrows pointing to the margins at the places added due to "stumbling" before having time to organize the thoughts. And, unlike what is said, her writing when published is soft yet sharp, echoing experiences and knowledge, sometimes quite humorous and fresh. 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 like her Memories of her childhood, her homeland, and the people - from street vendors to famous people. Those are really good pages of writing. Grandma and Grandchild are memories 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 so soft and gentle through each page of memories in the fading time, retained by haunting lines of writing. These are spaces of reminiscence about innocent, gentle dreams, and fond memories. Finding lost spaces in Dang Thi Hanh's creativity has modernized the ruins of memories that time has eroded and erased in many other people. Memories have been given and received on the background 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". Remembering and forgetting piled 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 the memories of individuals, families, and clans. But the beauty lies in the poetry of truth, of reality that has been tasted and contemplated. 4. Her remaining works today and perhaps in the future, in addition to a considerable number of translations, articles published in specialized newspapers and magazines, are articles in the History of French Literature Curriculum, the monograph Hugo's Novels or the book Some Faces of French Prose in the 20th Century, which are very good and profound. With Hugo, we are familiar, but reading her monograph, 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 truly attractive and convincing things. She applies theories about 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 a paper Notre Dame Cathedral – 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, it can be nothing, it can be a great title, but I think, the luckiest thing is to leave behind good pages of books, where future generations will read the feelings, the joys, the worries, the joys, the sorrows, the knowledge from life and books and the unfinished dialogues, for future generations to continue writing. In her memoirs, Grandmother and Grandchild, there is 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, even the centers of kingdoms, even the land registers of businesses”.
Only a memory, a love remains, as the sentence seems to suggest.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, MERITORIAL TEACHER DANG THI HANH .Year of birth: 1930 .Hometown: Nghe An .Graduated from Hanoi University of Letters in 1956 .Recognized as Associate Professor in 1984 .Awarded the title of Excellent Teacher in 2010 .Order of Academic Palms (French Republic) 2013 .Time working at the school: From 1965 to 1990 Work unit: Department of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Literature (Hanoi University of Science) . Main research directions:applying the approaches and techniques of new criticism, especially the findings of structuralism in literature, to the novels of Hugo and the novels of Proust. . Typical scientific works: History of 20th century French literature(editor-in-chief), Foreign Language Publishing House, 1993. Grandma and grandchild(Memoirs), Women Publishing House, 1994. Some faces of 20th century French prose, Danang Publishing House, 2000. Hugo's Novel(Monograph), National University Publishing House, 2002. Girl looking at the rain(Memoirs), Women Publishing House, 2008. Translation: Letters from Hanoi by Jean Tardieu Kafka's distortions