Profaca Bruno: Ploviti se ne mora

Bruno Profaca: No need to sail - Records from the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Danube

"Bruno Profaca's collection of travelogues is a small breviary of personal ship diaries, separated from reality as much as the sea is separated from the land, sailing from solid ground to a sailor. In fact, to a sailor adventure is not what is to us; what is adventure to us, is to him every day." (Veljko Barbieri)


In Profac's books and lexicon entries about his work, they speak of a captain and a writer; indeed he sailed as much as was necessary, even as a captain, which always sounds a bit unfathomable and textual, he undoubtedly also wrote, including about what can be seen in the world from the sea and in the contact of sea and land. And yet, in these stories, the writer's and those about the writer, the reader will only get a glimpse of the borderland between the sea and the land, between the home port and the destination, between the language with which one went to sea and the signs with which one navigated it, all the way to a world in which there is no port where one could definitively set sail; which is unrepeatably unfinished in the way that we have witnessed for generations from the Mediterranean straits of the departure of our civilization.

That is why Profac's trilogy about the sea ("Laughing Seagull", "You are always at the beginning before the sea" and Plovita si mora"), which modestly understands itself as a travelogue, is one of those traces on which the explorer himself, if he really remained that way, left his goals to others, as they always are and with which we also have great experience both when there is and when there is no mention of the sea.

Bruno Profaca is also a good writer who has nothing to do with sailings, those in reality and on the oceans. Turbulence of this kind always happens in a small sea, when the word is drowned in the glass of the unspoken. His lightness is in the mild anecdotalism that lives in the regions of memory, in the skepticism that one does not have to sail anyway. accomplished, except for the one that should be reported so as not to be forgotten, as an obligation and a goal that cannot be done without.

Even in cultures that can allow themselves a whole in a more casual way, such a book would be a common obligation, not because it is a precedent, but the reverse, because there must not be a precedent; because in it lives that non-polemical and collective layer that is always in short supply, no matter how successful the voyages are and the supplies are filled foreword: Vlaho Bogišić)

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Bruno Profaca, sailed for 15 years on all the world's seas under the domestic and foreign flag, and on the ocean tugs of "Brodospas". After that, he worked equally for ten years in tourism, port management and state administration (Ministry of Maritime Affairs, Transport and Communications). is a writer, journalist and publicist - from the first days at sea - he stopped counting the years. That's how his books "The call of the sea - the call of the coast", "The girl in every port" and "Večera s kapetan" were created The Society of Croatian Writers in Zagreb and the Society for the Study and Advancement of Maritime Affairs in Split.

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"Sailor Trilogy" by Brune Proface includes the books "The Laughing Seagull", "You are always at the beginning before the sea" and Ploviti se mora", and is available at a price of HRK 199 (as a set).