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 Am” in particular carries the nuance of a proper noun in this context, I think, the same way we would use “I” when describing our own activity. I think an apt way to interpret it is such like:
‘Now “I Am” become death, the destroyer of worlds’
Like, it’s not the simple “I” as we refer to ourselves, but rather the Great “I Am” for the ultimate being. It’s used in place of just “I” and the places where it is used make sense from our perspective if rewritten as such. Hopefully that is something more relatable for modern audiences.