Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds — J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer famously quoted this from The Bhagavad Geeta in the context of the nuclear bomb. The way this sentence is structured feels weird to me. “Now I am Death” or “Now I have become Death” sound much more natural in English to me.
Was he trying to simulate some formulation in Sanskrit that is not available in the English language?
I was curious about this last week and found an article that provides some other examples of this type of usage:
“The translation’s grammatical archaism made it even more powerful, resonating with lines in Tennyson (“I am become a name, for always roaming with a hungry heart”), Shakespeare (“I am come to know your pleasure”), and the Bible (“I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness”).”
The article also provides some commentary from a scholar about how to translate the original Sanskrit that Oppenheimer is referencing.
Edit: This article is referenced in the above article, and provides some interesting insight into why Oppenheimer was thinking of this quote. His situation was very similar to the situation of Arjuna, who speaks the original phrase in the ancient story. It really gives some additional insight into how many different mental levels Oppenheimer must have been able to conceptualize.
The original line comes from Chapter 11 Verse 32 of the Bhagavad Gita.
कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो
(kālo ’smi loka-kṣhaya-kṛit pravṛiddho)
The most literal translation would be: “I am mighty Time, the source of destruction of the worlds.” But काल can alternatively mean Death, and it looks like that’s the interpretation Oppenheimer chose. The verb here is a simple “am”, as in “I am Time/Death”. So the “am become” part is not due to any feature of Sanskrit itself.
But people usually take some liberty while translating poetry. Given the context (i.e. Krishna convincing Arjuna to fight, and showing him his true form), it makes sense to use “I have become” or even “I am become” (as explained in the other comments, it’s grammatically correct).
There’s a discussion here:
For the lazy:
The use of “is become” here relates to verbs of motion/transition; verbs of motion would take be while other verbs would take have. There is no such grammatical distinction in English perfect forms anymore.
English began with this distinction, as did sibling languages like German.
Yup it’s still like this in Dutch. It’s “ik ben … geworden” instead of “ik heb … geworden”.
I think grammatical simplifications like this are part of the reason why English is so popular as a second language around the world. It’s just easier to learn than many other languages. Another big simplification for example is that nouns are not gendered like in most other European languages.
Is “ik heb … geworden” even correct Dutch? It feels so awkward for me to read
No it’s not
It’s not awkward? Because that’s subjective, for me it’s awkward to read.
Or is it not correct? Because yay then, I guess.
Sorry for the ambiguity, I meant it’s grammatically not correct.
Okay great haha
Only tangentially related: Latin, the dead language, heavily tied into romantic, classical education. I recently found out that Latin in general wouldn’t say, I did this, but instead, this was done. Less of an emphasis on individual agency. Fascinating aspects about linguistics, how thought, sense of self has evolved over millenia.
