Rafael Squirru
Writer
and humanist
Squirru's fame as an art critic has dimmed other fundamental aspects of his intellectual reach, a wide range of action including his role as a humanistic thinker displayed in articles, books, round tables and lectures in his own country and abroad.
The humanist Squirru springs from a constellation of cultural influences. Among the literary, the three he considered essential were the Argentine epic poem Martín Fierro by José Hernández, the Bible (Old and New Testaments) and the works of William Shakespeare, of which he translated and published Hamlet, The tempest and several sonnets. A manuscript of Romeo and Juliet is yet to be published.
His conviction of the importance of a humanistic culture based on love as the main instrument for human progress, leads him at the beginning of the Fifties to the development of the Philosophy of the New Man, a cultural movement created with his close friend Fernando Demaría, Argentine poet, philosopher and Greek scholar. This will become his intellectual flag, an invitation to follow St. Paul's maxim to "put on the new man, which is being renewed" (Colossians, 3:10), shedding ideological conditionings, liberating one's own creativity, condemning totalitarianisms of whatever sort, which by their very nature conspire against man's mental freedom.
The "New Man" movement
