Lost in Translation: Oppenheimer’s famous Bhagvad Gita mis-quote
Christopher Nolan’s purported masterpiece Oppenheimer released this week to raving reviews from critics and audiences alike.
If you have been browsing the interwebs, amid the Nolan fanfare and the Oppenheimer vs Barbie memes, you are likely to have come across Robert J Oppenheimer’s fascination with the Bhagvada Gita, and his grim quotation of a verse from the scripture thusly,
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”
I remember hearing this quote a few years ago, and feeling the urge to know more, in no less measure due to the bizarre grammar involved.
As it turns out, similar grammatical form appears in olden English texts , ala “I am come to know your pleasure” from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and “I am come a light into the world…” from the Bible.
What caught my attention was a Wired UK article which highlighted a “minor” fallacy in RJO’s translation. (quick aside: when I looked up the said article to link here, it had a publish date of 07/21/2023 with no mention of an earlier publishing which seemed odd since I remembered reading it a few years ago. I ran the URL through Wayback Machine and got the original from Feb 2017. So much for SEO!)
I independently verified their interpretation on a very rigorously compiled version at Bhagvad-Gita.org. Here’s the English transliteration of the original Sanskrit quote,
Shree Bhagavaan uvaacha:
kaalosmi lokakshayakritpravruddho lokaansamaahartumiha pravruttaha |
ritepi tvaam na bhavishyanti sarve yevasthitaahaa pratyaneekeshu yodhaahaa
The phrase kaalosmi implies “I am kaal” (kaal + asmi). Kaal actually means time. Poor Oppenheimer, however, had reasons to be confused. Kaal is often used contextually to imply death, as in “your time has come”.
In this quote, Krishna implores Arjuna to perform his duty by impressing upon him the might of the arrow of time. He says that regardless of Arjuna’s actions in the war, the warriors in the opposing army will perish in the future, as time spares no one.
This seems to flow way more logically even though one could debate if the argument justifies killing in the name of dharma since everyone will die anyway.
Oppenheimer was a Sanskrit scholar so he likely went with his own limited translation, and thankfully his gaffe can be deemed inconsequential.
Most certainly, his use of Death instead of Time augmented the dramatic tone and perhaps made the quote more viral than it would have ever been.
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