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A picturebook as an intersemiotic translation of a source text involves a complex process of negotiating and generating meaning by interpretation, selection and mediation. When there is a considerable time gap between the first publication of the source text and its translation into a new visual modality, additional concerns appear that further complicate the process. To what extent is modernization recommended or needed? How does the unfolding of social practices and historical change affect the generation of meanings? What are the illustrator’s loyalties? The dynamic development of multimodal (polysemiotic) texts leads to the reinterpretation and expansion of Jakobson’s classic category of intersemiotic translation. It is used in the study of visual literature, which raises methodological questions as to whether book illustrating is a translational activity. Today intersemiotic translation seems much closer to adaptation or “resemiotization” (O’Halloran et al. 2016) than to interlingual translation proper. Thus the study of discrepancies, shifts and changes, rather than the pursuit of equivalence, may offer new insights. A case in point is the artistic picturebook Jak ciężko być królem [How Hard It Is to Be a King] (2018) by Iwona Chmielewska, who provides a contemporary visual interpretation of the almost century-old King Matt the First (Król Maciuś Pierwszy) (1923). Written by a Polish-Jewish pedagogue, educator and writer, Janusz Korczak’s poignant and multilayered novel about a child king is a recognizable children’s classic with four English translations available. Drawing on desrciptive translation studies, the aim of the article is to analyze the picturebook at hand as an intersemiotic translation, mapped against the existing translation series. What are its translational and pictorial dominant features? What characterizes the artist’s multimodal strategies in representing the source text? How is the unsettling or ambiguous content mediated? Last but not least, the articles focuses on interdiscursivity to inquire how the societal and institutional context as well as the discourse of memory surrounding Janusz Korczak’s death in the Holocaust affect the meaning and where and how they ‘place’ the author and his child hero.