Traditionally, memoirs are studied for their testimonial value, but this paper offers a new perspective on understanding the continual interpretative work that takes place in the written forms of a lived extreme experience of suffering. During the period between 1956 and 1999, post-colonial Morocco witnessed different uprisings against the monarchy, such as the war of the Rif (1958) and the two consecutive coups d’état in 1971 and 1972. The state did not hesitate to use its sovereign ability to exercise absolute power and inflict destruction on individuals and groups. Consequently, a sizable number of Moroccan citizens—about fifty thousand in total– experienced the Moroccan state’s necropower (Achille Mbembe) in prisons and secret detention centers. To reify its boundless ability to effectuate destruction, the state deployed myriad torture techniques that left their enduring mark on the victims’ bodies, souls and memories. These marks, however, are not confined to the imprisoned body; by means of an “intersemiotic translation” they transition from the sphere of “nonverbal signs” (physical and psychological pain) to the signs of language and literary text (memoir, novel, poetry, graphic novel). Using a reversed paradigm of Jakoboson’s theory of intersemiotic translation as transferring nonverbal signs—pain, suffering, and torment—into written form, I argue that the prison memoirs of Ahmed Merzouki (Cellule 10), Aziz BenBine (TAZMAMORT), Fatna El Bouih (Hadith al ‘atama/Talk of darkness) and Jawad Mdidich (La Chambre noire) are elaborate intersemiotic translations of state-inflicted suffering. This paper interrogates the processes of description, understanding and transformation, which are integral operations to the very notion of translation, in these former prisoners’ representation of their disappearance experience and detention during the period of political repression in Morocco. Additionally, I analyze the multiple levels of translation at play in these memoirs as a reflection of the Moroccan state’s endeavor not only to punish, but to transform its detainees into a state of living death. While these writers translate their own pain, they also interpret and reflect on the suffering of their colleagues, and hence allow an inter-subjective interpretation of pain. These memoirs, therefore, serve as a passageway to revisiting the historiography of a crucial era in modern Moroccan history.