This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs to explain quite a bit about Roman society under Augustus for you to understand what is going on in detail in Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia. The Tao te Ching suffers from being written in a style that was very much for people in the know in a certain milieu, limited texts, and a huge amount of cultural baggage on top. The most interesting recent scholarly translation I know of is by Victor Mair, of a different, recently discovered text, and his contention is that the book is a 'mirror for princes' and not a mystical text at all.

> they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means

I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English. My personal favorite is a translation that opens with 'Bro!'.