For my part, Janet, I think you are right that we have enough to occupy us with the forms that grow out of our own language. I am also western-centered enough to think that with accent and rhyme we outgun the Japanese in the verse department.
I don't entirely agree that we can never access Japanese poetry. But one must learn the language(at least two of several variants, the colloquial and the literary), read many, many Japanese books, and become immersed in the culture, or cultures of the country, in order to experience the effects of the poems as an educated and sensitive Japanese person may do. Few foreigners, starting as adults, can acquire Japanese any great degree of literacy and fluency or participate in the culture to any great depth. But one can, with a few years study and by spending well a year or two in Japan, go some distance along the road to understanding.
Without such an effort, which doubtless requires other motives than merely a desire to access Japanese poetry, we have to resign ourselves to reading their poems as through a glass darkly.
G/W
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