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.
