Why is “Now I Am Become Death” phrased so awkwardly in English? - eviltoast

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?

  • redlaWw@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think that’s quite right - I’m not fluent in latin, but I know it has both passive and active conjugations for its verbs, so you can express both the idea of doing something and the idea of something being done.

    • pchem@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Yes, but the tendency is there. Notably, “Alea iacta est” (commonly translated as “The die has fallen”) is closer in literal meaning to “The die has been thrown”.