In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.

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