[zozbot234]

> Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power

In my view, "power" is simply not the kind of stuff that these complex and nuanced concerns could possibly "boil down to", even in principle. It's a rather ambiguous word that could easily point to a wide, even unlimited variety of social dynamics, featuring very different sorts of affordance (in the sense of "power to achieve X"), influence or perhaps the effect of physical, material constraints. These more detailed dynamics are what should be inquired upon and interrogated to try and figure out what, if anything, they're "boiling down" to. I suspect that this might boil down to a simple change in the material structure of society, like "communication used to be hard and this forced cultures apart from each other; the exact opposite is going on today, where people are actively seeking to disregard these former boundaries, even at some cost in cohesion and social/cultural development at the smaller scale."

People might argue either way whether or not the word "power" can usefully summarize these developments. Ultimately, it just seems to obscure more than it clarifies.