From 1945 to 1951, Miłosz served as a cultural attaché for the newly formed People's Republic of Poland. It was in this capacity that he first met Jane Zielonko, the future translator of "The Captive Mind", with whom he had a brief relationship. He moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., and finally to Paris, organizing and promoting Polish cultural occasions such as musical concerts, art exhibitions, and literary and cinematic events. Although he was a representative of Poland, which had become a Soviet satellite country behind the Iron Curtain, he was not a member of any communist party. In "The Captive Mind", he explained his reasons for accepting the role:My mother tongue, work in my mother tongue, is for me the most important thing in life. And my country, where what I wrote could be printed and could reach the public, lay within the Eastern Empire. My aim and purpose was to keep alive freedom of thought in my own special field; I sought in full knowledge and conscience to subordinate my conduct to the fulfillment of that aim. I served abroad because I was thus relieved from direct pressure and, in the material which I sent to my publishers, could be bolder than my colleagues at home. I did not want to become an émigré and so give up all chance of taking a hand in what was going on in my own country.Miłosz did not publish a book while he was a representative of the Polish government. Instead, he wrote articles for various Polish periodicals introducing readers to American writers like Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, and W. H. Auden. He also translated into Polish Shakespeare's "Othello" and the work of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Pablo Neruda, and others.