Have always wondered about this. This is such an enormously famous quote although the exact choice of words has always perplexed me. Initially figured it is an artifact of translation, but then, wouldn’t you translate it into the new language in a way that is grammatical? Or maybe there is some intention behind this weird phrasing that is just lost on me? I’m not a linguist so eli5
In: 1806
In Middle English, you had a quirk of grammar where you could replace the verb “has” with the verb “be” in front of certain words. The famous example is from the Bible: “He *is* risen”, where “is” replaces “has” — nowadays we would just say “he *has* risen”.
This fell out of usage as we moved into Modern English, but many older poetic and religious texts retained some of these old Middle English quirks (like the Bible) and people would occasionally bring this usage back as a way of sounding deliberately older and regal and poetic — the same way you might hear someone say “shall we” today.
So the grammar is correct, its just a relic of grammar that hasn’t been regularly used in 600 years. The quote itself comes from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, which was translated into English in the late 1700s and deliberately used this archaic grammar to give it the book the same feel as other ancient religious texts, like the Bible. The grammar today would just be “I *have* become death”. Its grammar wasn’t “updated” in the same way that we don’t really “update” the grammar of translations of other ancient religious texts — if you read translations of the Torah or the Quran they are also filled with “antiquated” writing like this.
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