How foreign is this "experience of the foreign"?

While I overall enjoyed the theoretical claims that Berman makes as he summarizes German Romantic thoughts on translation, I was kind of annoyed by the repeated reference to the Greeks as the "foreign" culture with which the German's must primarily interact with in their translations. It is this kind of encounter with a "foreign" that doesn't cause one to fall into the nasty aporetic trap of strangeness and in turn allows for the move of double fidelity to both the original text and the native language in translations.

What I find problematic in this claim is that it seeks to posit the experience of the Greeks as the primary beneficial experience of the foreign. The foreign here is not an experience with the "exotic orientalism" of say China or India that would instantly produce a dizzying vertigo in the German sensibility. Heavens no. Instead, the encounter with the foreign through translations is primarily viewed as an experience with the pinnacle of Western civilization (and thereby implicitly makes the claim that the Germans are heirs via translation of this tradition), which was for the German Romantics, the Greeks. In fact Berman even includes a quote from Eckermann stating as much: " 'But while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind ourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a model. We must not give this value to the Chinese, or the Serbian, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but if we really want a model, we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of human kind is always represented. All the rest we must look at only historically, appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goes' " (63).

What the hell? The German Romantics (or at least Eckermann--although Berman makes no real attempt to engage with this) thus seem to have only wanted an experience a "comfortable" foreign as a model, one that will buttress their belief in the preminence of Western civilization, and thereby allow them to construct the German national language and culture as its necessary apotheosis. I know it sounds like I'm hating on the Germans...but it just seem highly contradictory that all of a sudden there are "acceptable" and "non-acceptable" cultures with which to construct the experience of the foreign. This seems to demarcate a geographical limit to the German Romantic theory of translation to the Northwestern hemisphere... My question is then how can we use the elements of the German Romantic theory of translation to talk about East Asia? I think that we can definitely extropolate elements, but I'm wondering what exactly we would have to tweak and modify to make it work. What, in our current moment of globalization, actually constitutes an experience of the foreign?