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?
Yep and this construct is still pretty normal in German, we would say for example “ich bin gegangen” (I am gone) versus “Ich hab gesagt“ (I have said). Honestly I don’t think could explain exactly why some words take an “I am” construct but motion is as good a theory as any.