by Stephen Cenon D. Talla
It was in 2006 when my late Uncle Naldo handed me a box filled with treasure — Lolo Luis G. Dato manuscript. It has hundreds of poems, sonnets – typewritten with some handwritten annotations. Honestly, at the time I did not know what to do with it.
Later that year, I was able to post his “An Autobiographical Sketch” and some of his works. My original plan was to encode and digitize the texts. Somewhere along the way, I got sidetracked with my work (and life!) so I wasn’t able to finish it.
I re-unpacked the papers today, and it has literally thousands of pages and hundreds of poems and sonnets. I could not begin to imagine the effort and time (and talent) lolo Luis devoted to his works. The original text of the “Land of Mai” Volume 1 is even included. After my mild stroke in 12th of June this year (2019), encoding of these will be quite a challenge, not with the help of my children. There is technology called a “scanner” and an OCR software that i will utilize. It will hasten the process. I intend to stick with the original plan, and will post the works of lolo Luis on this blog on installment basis.
Perhaps during the course of time, I could publish these collection as a book, or series of books.
So, wish me luck!
UPDATE (9/13/2022): Virtually all of LGD’s works are published online (on this site) and six books of his verses were independently published at the amazon platform.
