Why is “Now I Am Become Death” phrased so awkwardly in English?
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?
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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.
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.
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".
We can do both in modern English as well, but there are clear preferences by modern English speakers
I took 2 years of Latin in high school, but that was decades ago, so you may be right