I was a Comp Lit Ph.D. graduate in the 1980's at a large state university. We were not required or encouraged to explore non-European literatures in our studies, but in many courses at my school, we had to read at least one of the works we studied in the original. So if I had wanted to include poems by Yunus Emre in a paper, I would have done so based on translations, since my school didn't offer courses in Old Anatolian Turkish. This focus would of course have prioritized Western language poets, though half a loaf would have been better than no loaf--no one in my program read all the languages of all the writers we discussed.

No individual in the course of a lifetime has the leisure to read all the writers in a given time section in the original languages. A scholar of Arabic language / literature who's not familiar with Catalan is just as likely to make overgeneralizations as is a Catalan scholar who's not familiar with Arabic. As long as we acknowledge our blind spots, we should take risks and compare writers from outside our specialty with those we know well. Those who follow after us can remediate our ignorance.