Astrotruckers

I've just finished reading Astrotruckers - a collection of short stories by Mikael Niemi.

The stories all involve some kind of philosophical or pseudo-scientific exploration against a general, entertainingly inconsistent, background of the future exploration of space. In tone they are wry and detached, and the language is often quite carefully spare and distancing. I enjoyed them a lot. As I was reading them, they reminded me of nothing so much as Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, and Invisible Cities - so as you can see I was beginning to think quite highly of this new book.

And then I started to wonder.

How similar are they really? Astrotruckers is "translated from the original Finnish by Laurie Thompson" and I can only read Calvino in translation also. Isn't it possible that what I read as a rather distanced style - which they do seem to have in common - is just an effect of the translation? Although there are similarities in content and approach, the strongest connection does come from the use of language, and it may not be there in the original.
This is an area I feel singularly unfitted to write about - however this is a blog, and writing about things for which one is singularly unfitted is what blogs are all about, so here we go.
I don't have fantastic language skills. The closest I can get to reading a foreign-language work comfortably in both the original and in contemporary English is medieval English - say as hard as the Gawain-poet. Chaucer is straightforward. So if for the moment we treat Fourteenth-century English as a foreign language (debatable), how do the translations of the works I know well stack up?
Mostly, I have to say, poorly. It is rare to find a translation with the same degree of bite and engagement as the originals. Mostly they seem bland, a little unreadable. You wonder why there was that much fuss about the original. So - from a casual, limited and unsystematic observation - the act of translation can result in the idiosyncrasies of the original becoming a little blurred. For a piece of fiction that I don't know, which is at least in part philosophical in content, might this come across as a sardonic detachment? Possibly.
But perhaps I'm comparing my experience of poetry in translation with translations of narrative - unfair, perhaps if poetry is about an explicit heightening of language. Arguably that has some truth, however Chaucer in particular is a poet with a strong focus on narrative. There was then no real alternative form for original story-telling; novels and short stories are a later invention in English. So I would submit that the comparison may still hold.
So. Inconclusive, perhaps. I should also note that a review at totally Sci-Fi is much less struck than I am with Astrotruckers, seeing it as essentially derivative of Hitchhiker and Space Truckers, amongst others- although a posting at "Oxford College distance learning" is more enthusiastic. Finally, therefore, a last question: because of the perceived and possibly false stylistic similarity to Calvino, am I seeing the collection as more impressive than I might otherwise?
(Astrotruckers, first published in Finnish in 2004, English translation, 2007)