[1] He was awarded the Order of Friendship by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 in recognition of his Vietnamese translations of the poetry of Alexander Pushkin.
[2][3] Toàn was born in Phù Lưu Village, Từ Sơn Town, Bắc Ninh Province, and went abroad for higher education, first to China in 1951 and then to the Soviet Union in 1954.
Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1961.
He went on to become chairman of the Vietnam Writers' Association's Council on Literary Translation (Hội đồng Dịch thuật Văn học), as well as director of the Center for East-West Cultures and Languages (Trung tâm Văn hóa Ngôn ngữ Đông Tây).
Aside from Pushkin, other authors whose works he has translated into Vietnamese include Mikhail Lermontov, Vítězslav Nezval, Sergei Yesenin, and Rasul Gamzatov.