the homeland, the pathos of the Pashtuns, or the love between two young people from different social backgrounds run through the stories. Most of Pazhwak's prose in Pashto language remains unpublished, including half a dozen short stories and dramas. Pazhwak also translated foreign literature into Dari. He translated, frequently from English poetry, factual texts and fiction some of which were published in Afghanistan while others remain unpublished. Pazhwak translated the Psalms of King David (from Urdu) and the works of Khalil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Lord Byron, John Keats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Reynold A. Nicholson, William Pitt Root and Jacques Prévert (from French). Additionally, Pazhwak translated selected poems and fragments from the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Victor Hugo. Among the translations that were published were Pishwa (‘The Prophet’) by Khalil Gibran and Baghban (‘The Gardener’) by the Indian author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Rabindranath Tagore. Themes, Motifs and Strategies Pazhwak spent more than half of his life abroad, far away from his homeland in Europe, and . Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, his love for his country and his patriotic intellectual and emotional connectedness to are always present in his work. His poetry and prose writing allow an authentic insight into certain problem sets that afflict society in Afghanistan. Often Pazhwak's experience of Western democracies was directly processed in his literary creativity. He interprets through literary works, whereby his interpretation is always based on a critical stance, carrying a clearly outlined implicit message. But it is up to the reader to extract the message from the respective texts. The implicit criticism which Pazhwak has expressed in his prose and poetry was in its time a path that promised success, allowing him, as a citizen without political power, to contribute to social, political and intellectual development of the Afghan society. Afghan society is mostly conservative and steeped in traditional norms, structures, and ways of thinking. The futility of trying to introduce changes to traditions that would affect the fabric of society was revealed in the failure of King Amanullah's reforms in the 1920s. King Amanullah intended to reshape his country, introducing it to modernity through political and social changes that followed the example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Republic of Turkey. His modernization measures for Afghan society, for example the removal of the hijab, the introduction of Western clothes, compulsory