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 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.